Road To Forge

Tag: future

  • Everyone Says AI Is Making Us Stupid. I Think It Is Making Me Smarter.

    By Bogdan — RoadToForge

    There is a conversation happening right now about artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

    A lot of people are worried.

    They say AI will make us lazy. Make us stop thinking. Make us dependent on machines for answers we used to find ourselves.

    I understand the concern.

    But after two months of using AI every single day — I disagree.

    And I want to explain why.

    It has made me think more. Not less.

    Since I started using AI as a creative partner I read more carefully. I express myself more clearly. I research things I would never have looked up before. I question information rather than just accepting it.

    Because when you use AI as a thinking partner — not just an answer machine — it demands more from you. Not less.

    What surprised me most is what it actually feels like to use it properly. It feels like having a creative partner. One that is always available. Always focused. Always ready to take your idea seriously and help you build it into something real. Not a replacement for your thinking. A companion to it.

    And along the way I also discovered something I did not expect. AI makes mistakes. Confidently. Sometimes spectacularly. I came in thinking this was an all knowing intelligence with absolute answers. It is not. It is a tool. A remarkable tool. But it needs you. Your judgment. Your instinct. Your ability to question what it tells you and push back when something feels wrong. Without that human input the tool produces mediocre results at best and wrong answers at worst.

    That realisation actually made me more confident. Not less. Because it meant I was never just following instructions. I was always in charge.

    The people who will get stupider from AI are the ones who stop thinking and just copy answers.

    The people who will get smarter are the ones who use it to think harder and reach further than they could before.

    But here is what really excites me.

    AI is closing a gap that has existed for a very long time.

    Before AI — creating quality content, starting a business, learning a new skill, building something from nothing — all of it required resources that most ordinary people simply did not have.

    Money. Time. Education. Connections. Equipment. Training.

    A truck driver with an idea and a phone could not compete with a professional animation studio. A person without a marketing degree could not build a brand. Someone without years of technical training could not produce educational video content.

    That gap was real. And it kept a lot of talented people on the wrong side of it.

    AI is changing that.

    Not perfectly. Not instantly. But meaningfully.

    I am a truck driver.

    I work long shifts. I have three children. I have no film school background. No animation training. No marketing degree. No business experience.

    Two months ago I had an idea and a phone.

    Today I am running content channels. Writing a blog. Building a brand. Analysing audience data. Creating animated educational videos that adults say could be shown in classrooms.

    None of that was possible for someone like me two years ago.

    AI gave me the tools. But I brought the idea. The story. The persistence. The creativity. The lived experience that no algorithm can replicate.

    That is the honest truth about what AI actually does.

    It does not replace what makes you human.

    It removes the technical barriers that were stopping you from expressing it.

    And the specialists?

    The person with ten years of Photoshop experience. The professional scriptwriter. The trained animator.

    They still have advantages. Real ones. Experience matters. Craft matters. Depth matters.

    But the gap between them and an ordinary curious person with a good idea — that gap is closing faster than anyone expected.

    And I think that is mostly a good thing.

    Because talent was never equally distributed by background or privilege.

    So no.

    AI is not making us stupid.

    Used well — it is making some of us smarter, faster, more capable and more creative than we ever thought possible.

    The question is not whether to use it.

    The question is what you bring to it.

    — Bogdan

  • One Day This Will Look Like Wood Carving

    By Bogdan — RoadToForge
    I started this blog because someone told me it could make me money.
    That was the honest reason. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
    But somewhere along the way something shifted. I stopped thinking about the income and started thinking about something else entirely. Something I did not expect.
    I started thinking about leaving a message behind.
    Not for the internet. Not for followers or traffic or any of that. But for my children. And maybe — this sounds strange to say out loud — for someone reading this in two hundred years. Or five hundred. Or a thousand.
    Think about the people who wrote on scrolls. On animal skin. On stone. They carved words and symbols into whatever surface they could find. They probably never imagined that thousands of years later humanity would look at those marks and find meaning in them. Enlightenment even. They were just writing. Just leaving something behind. Just saying — I was here. This is what I thought. This is what I lived.
    I am not saying my blog will survive a thousand years. The thought makes me laugh honestly.
    But the impulse is the same. Deeper than money. Deeper than traffic. Just — I want my children to know who their father was. What he was thinking at forty years old. What he believed. What he was building. What kept him going on a long drive through the dark.
    That is worth writing for. Even if nobody else ever reads it.
    And then I started thinking about something else.
    Right now in 2026 I am using artificial intelligence to create cartoon videos for children. I type a description into my phone and minutes later a cartoon character appears. Moving. Talking. Teaching kids about helicopters and trains and airplanes.
    It feels revolutionary. It feels like the most exciting time to be alive.
    And it probably is.
    But so did every other era to the people living in it.
    The people who first used a printing press probably felt the same way. The first person to photograph a human face. The first filmmaker. The first person to record a voice. Each one of them standing at what felt like the edge of everything new.
    And now we look back at those early tools and smile at how primitive they seem.
    Because they are.
    I think about Constantin Brâncuși sometimes. The Romanian sculptor. One of the greatest artists who ever lived. He worked with stone and wood and bronze. Simple materials. His hands. His tools. His vision.
    I am not comparing myself to Brâncuși. I want to be very clear about that. The thought genuinely makes me laugh.
    But the impulse — the desire to make something — that part I understand.
    He used the tools of his time. I am using the tools of mine.
    And one day — maybe two hundred years from now. Maybe three hundred. Maybe sooner because technology moves so fast now — someone will look at what we made in 2026 with AI on our phones and it will feel exactly like wood carving feels to us today.
    Ancient. Primitive. Charming. Human.
    So here is what I want to say to anyone reading this.
    Use these tools now. Whatever you want to make — make it. Write something. Create something. Build something. Document something. Express something true about your life and your time.
    Not because it will make you famous. Not even because it will make you money.
    But because this moment — right now — is genuinely historic. The beginning of something enormous that none of us can fully see yet.
    And the people who picked up the tools at the beginning — the ones who didn’t wait until it was perfected or proven or safe — those are the ones whose work becomes interesting later.
    Be one of those people.
    I started this blog for money. I kept writing it for something I cannot fully name. Something between legacy and expression and the simple human desire to leave a mark.
    To say — I was here. In 2026. Forty years old. Romanian. Truck driver. Father. Believer.
    Using what they will one day call ancient technology.
    — Bogdan

  • The World I Grew Up In No Longer Exists

    By Bogdan — RoadToForge
    I want to be clear from the start — what follows is my personal vision. The dreams of someone who has watched the world transform beyond recognition in one lifetime and cannot help but wonder what comes next. I am not Nostradamus. But I have lived through enough change to know that what seems impossible today has a habit of becoming ordinary tomorrow.
    Take it as dreaming. That is what it is.
    What I Grew Up With
    I was born in 1986 in Romania. We had a black and white television. We had a telephone that connected through a human operator who physically plugged wires together to connect your call. We had no internet, no mobile phones, no personal computers.
    When I was young, the most exciting technology in my world was an Atari games console. Then came the early PlayStations. Then the first Windows computers — clunky, slow, revolutionary. I remember sitting in internet cafes in Romania playing Counter-Strike, talking to strangers on MSN Messenger and Yahoo Chat, feeling like the future had arrived.
    It had barely started.
    Then came the first mobile phones — brick-sized, one bar of signal if you were lucky, a tiny screen with green text. Everyone thought they were extraordinary. Then smartphones arrived and made those bricks look like something from ancient history.
    I think about that a lot. How quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary. And then obsolete.
    The phone I am speaking into right now — the one I use to build AI-generated cartoon characters and write blog articles while driving a truck — would have seemed like pure science fiction to the ten year old version of me watching Atari pixels on a screen in Romania.
    And here is the thought that stays with me: the technology I am using today will one day look just as ancient to someone else.
    What I Envision Coming
    This is my personal vision. I could be wrong about some of it. But this is genuinely what I see when I look forward.
    Within ten years I can see the beginning of the end of the smartphone as we know it. Not because phones stop working but because something better replaces them. Glasses or some kind of wearable that overlays information onto the real world. You will walk down the street and see directions, messages, information — all visible without looking down at a screen. You will speak naturally and AI will respond, search, translate, assist. Hands mostly free. Eyes mostly up.
    Within that same period I can see VR and shared virtual spaces becoming genuinely social. Not the clunky headsets of today but something lighter, more natural. You will be able to meet a friend in a virtual version of your favourite place — a pub, a park, a beach — while physically sitting in your own home. The line between physical and digital presence will blur in ways that are both exciting and difficult to fully imagine right now.
    Further out — twenty, thirty years — I envision humanoid robots with genuine AI intelligence existing in meaningful numbers. Not science fiction robots. Real machines that can navigate the world, perform physical tasks, respond to situations with something that resembles judgment. I watched a television series called Raised by Wolves that explored what a world with autonomous AI humanoids might look like. It stayed with me. Because it did not feel entirely impossible.
    And space. I can see bases being established on nearby planets within my children’s lifetime — outposts, research stations, the beginning of something. Humanoid robots powered by AI will likely travel further than any human body could survive, exploring and preparing places we may one day follow.
    All of this would happen so much faster if countries worked together instead of fighting each other. Not because countries are the problem — I actually love countries. I love the culture, the traditions, the languages, the things that make each place on Earth unique. That richness is worth protecting.
    The problem is the egotistical leaders who cannot be satisfied with what they have. The imperialists who would rather take a piece of someone else’s land than use their energy and resources on what actually matters. Imagine if that same energy went toward nuclear fusion — unlimited clean energy for everyone. Toward curing cancer. Toward space travel that goes beyond anything we currently dream of.
    These things are not impossible. They are just waiting for us to stop wasting ourselves on petty conflicts and start working together on what actually matters for humanity.
    I believe we will get there eventually. I just wish it did not have to take so long.
    The Thing That Actually Strikes Me
    When I think about all of this, the thing that genuinely stays with me is not the technology itself. It is the speed.
    From a black and white television with valve lamps inside to AI-generated video on a smartphone in one lifetime. From a human telephone operator plugging wires together to instant global communication in one lifetime. From Atari pixels to virtual reality in one lifetime.
    Whatever is coming next will arrive faster than we expect. And the generation growing up today — my children included — will look back at our current technology the way I look back at those brick-sized phones and think: how did they manage with that?
    The answer, of course, is that we thought it was extraordinary. Because it was. At the time.
    These are my thoughts. My personal vision of what might come. What do you envision? I would genuinely like to know.
    — Bogdan