03/28/2026
20 WATTS AND THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE: A Different Take on the AI Debate
The Vagility Team was discussing something in the lab that most AI conversations miss entirely.
The human brain runs on roughly 20 watts of biological power. The same brain that built civilization, wrote music, and debugged systems at 2am. Now we have AI running on megawatts of infrastructure, and the first instinct is to ask: does one replace the other?
That framing is wrong.
Every major cognitive tool humanity has built, from writing to the printing press to the internet, followed the same pattern. We extended what the 20-watt engine could reach. AI is not different. It is just faster and more capable than any tool we have built before.
The teams that get this right are not the ones removing humans from the loop. They are the ones designing systems where AI handles the friction and humans handle the judgment.
There is a synthesis formula worth understanding. We break it down in our latest Insight.
Read the full briefing here: https://vagility.com/blog/twenty-watts-future-of-intelligence