I think artificial intelligence is inevitable if you live in a developed civilization.

The term was first coined in the summer of 1956 by John McCarthy, a young mathematician who hosted an academic summit at Dartmouth to discuss how machines might process language and concepts in ways useful to humans. He was joined by a few visionaries, including the economist Herbert Simon, who later won the Nobel Prize. But if you look back at the origin of “artificial intelligence”—including the rudimentary uses of machines and automation—the history travels back several centuries. It spans inventions as old as 400 BCE in ancient Greece, Leonardo da Vinci’s designs in fifteenth-century Italy, Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and the Turing Test it inspired, and many more that laid the groundwork.

As someone who does not specialize in this field, I can only speak to what I have noticed. Over the last decade or so, the term has come up an incredible number of times, and it has crept into my daily life in one form or another. Philip K. Dick’s vision of a robot with a conscience is no longer a distant future—it feels tangible. AI has also become a geopolitical subject, with a few developed nations, including the United States, China, and South Korea, entering a breakneck race to advance the technology. The full integration of AI relies on the convergence of software and hardware. That is the moment, I think, when I will finally feel that humans and AIs coexist.

Many jobs are predicted to be replaced by AI, and you need to be mentally and strategically prepared to survive in that market. In the arts and entertainment industry, the resistance is strong, and I stand on the side of the artists who create. But I also think you can take advantage of the technology rather than ruling it out and vilifying it entirely. Understanding and accepting what AI is capable of is the key to coexisting with it. Being able to use the technology as your tool makes you a “creator” instead of an “observer.”

You can start with little things. When you run a Google search, pay attention to what the results tell you and how they guide your follow-up search. As a next step, ask more complex questions—the kind you find thought-provoking, or the kind that are not straightforward and require real research. You will realize that what you ask, and how you write a “prompt,” determines the quality of the answer you get. The full potential of AI is met when it operates within the physical world. Computers, wearables, and biometrics are early examples, and the barrier to reaching the next level is a hardware problem. Processing power, memory, durable materials, portability, and android mechanics have all been advancing at a freaky speed. Soon we will not be able to tell humans and robots apart without meticulous examination.

If there is one thing I want to reemphasize, it is integration—on every level. Software with hardware. Human with machine. The technology is coming whether we are ready or not. The only choice left is whether we meet it as creators or as observers.