Why AI is only the warm up act

For three years, I told business leaders to pay attention to AI. That advice was correct. It was also incomplete. In February 2026, I reviewed a book called Superconvergence. Its thesis reframed everything I thought I understood about where technology was heading.

AI is not the main event. It is the warm-up act. The main show is the bio-economy. An economy where living systems become manufacturing platforms, where biology is programmable, and where the most valuable raw materials are not data or minerals but cells, genes, and proteins.

The #mindcandy signals were hiding in the biology

In June 2025, one of my #mindcandy editions described insects engineered as bio-factories — producing pharmaceutical ingredients through biological processes that need a fraction of the energy conventional manufacturing requires. Another #mindcandy covered mushrooms communicating through mycelium networks: distributed intelligence that has existed for four hundred million years, being rediscovered by a species that has computed with silicon for sixty.

Enough of this pattern accumulated that it earned its own name — Synthetic Biological Intelligence. Not artificial. Not natural. A third category, built from living tissue, sitting in a space no existing framework had words for.