I’ve been training AI on myself—my voice, my tone, and even my visual thinking style. The above visual represents an intimate collaboration between AI and me, leveraging my seasoned background of giving explicit, detailed direction to high-performing teams, translated into “prompting”. My guidance is combined with OpenAI’s latest multimodal data model, which can handle much more nuance and generate visuals with increasing depth and conceptuality (again, highly dependent on its human counterpart, collaborating with the AI).

My stylus never touched the above visual on an iPad or via a cursor directed from a trackpad. It was simply a series of back-and-forth text exchanges built on a foundation of high-quality data. I provided Open AI with plenty of writing samples (also available all over the Web for over 20 years), and I was sitting on over a year’s worth of visual data, which I crafted by hand. The results are good—no, excellent. They don’t just feel like me, they are me. So much so, I put my signature on the visual—or at least the AI-generated version.

I have been assimilated.

Introduced in 1989 on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg weren’t just another sci-fi villain—they were a warning. A metaphor. A manifestation of our deepest fears about losing what makes us human in exchange for “perfection.” Think of them as the original AI-powered startup with a single-minded mission: scale at all costs. Assimilate everything. Optimize everyone. They weren’t evil in the traditional sense. That’s what made them terrifying. The Borg didn’t hate you—they didn’t need you to be you anymore. They’d absorb your individuality, culture, and quirks into the collective.

The Borg captured my imagination the moment I first saw them. Resistance was futile. The visionary depiction of a collective intelligence life-form that absorbed entire societies into the sterile machine-like hive-mind was a delightfully horrifying and dystopian vision of humanity’s fate as we actively explored the ends of the universe.

As much as AI empowers us to upload versions of ourselves at the individual or enterprise level, it also gives us the potential to scale our humanity. To quote another Sci-Fi classic, Blade Runner—AI might just make us “more human than human”

The Assimilation Age

We are at the edge of something once purely speculative—a new kind of assimilation. But unlike the cold, dystopian vision Star Trek warned us about, the reality unfolding today feels more nuanced. This is not about being erased. It’s about being extended.

In this new era, assimilation doesn’t mean the loss of self—it means the encoding of self. It’s uploading our quirks, patterns, stories, and voices into systems that can learn from, reflect, and collaborate with. We are not disappearing into the machine. We are teaching it to know us, to represent us, and to amplify us.

If the Industrial Age scaled muscle and the Information Age scaled knowledge, the Assimilation Age is scaling selfhood. It's no longer about simply consuming content or using tools—it’s about merging with systems that learn who we are and begin to act in concert with our intent.

This raises profound questions. What does it mean to be "you" when a model can speak in your voice, sketch in your style, even think in frameworks you’ve honed over decades? Is that a dilution—or a kind of digital reincarnation? And if the tools you’ve trained can continue creating in your likeness long after your hand has stopped drawing or typing… is that terrifying? Or beautiful?

I’ve come to see it as something else entirely. It’s not about giving up control, about evolving the boundaries of authorship. It’s about collaborating with something that doesn’t replace us, but extends us. My AI doesn’t just work for me—it works with me. And in that sense, I haven’t been consumed by a collective...

I’ve built a collective of one.

The Assimilation Age challenges us to rethink our relationship with identity, authorship, and originality. It invites us to consider that maybe, just maybe, resistance is futile, but not because we’re being overrun. The real opportunity lies in learning and shaping how we are absorbed. We are not erased, but instead expressed, at scale.

This isn’t about perfection. It’s about projecting ourselves across more surface area while still remaining true to our individual human essence.

The Assimilation Age is just getting started.

Visually yours,