AI will help people express intelligence that conventional systems have failed to recognise, writes Guy Hands
When I started school at five, I could not read or write.
I could, however, talk. In fact, I talked a lot. My mother had been known as “Miss Chatterbox” while growing up in Durban, South Africa. I was determined to outdo her. I was curious about everything. If I did not understand an answer, I asked someone else. If that failed, I kept asking or tried something else. I learnt by listening, talking and doing. As far as I was concerned, the world was already teaching me.
My class teacher saw things differently. After a few weeks, she called my mother into school after lessons while I waited outside the classroom. Eventually the door opened, and my mother came out in tears. The teacher had told her that my inability to read or write was entirely my mother's fault. My mother was South African. Her accent had apparently confused me so completely that I could not connect the words I heard at home with the words on the page.
It was nonsense. A year later I was diagnosed with very severe dyslexia and dyspraxia. The problem was not my mother’s accent. Nor was it intelligence. My brain processed language differently from the way the school expected. That taught me something I have never forgotten. People often confuse difficulty in communicating with a lack of intelligence.
They are not the same thing. Throughout my career, I could analyse businesses, negotiate transactions and recognise patterns that others missed. I could see things, understand them, argue them and explain them out loud.
But writing remains painfully difficult. My spelling age is that of a seven-year-old. Spellcheck often has no idea what I mean. Every speech, important letter, presentation and article has required enormous effort and help from colleagues and my wife for years.
Then along came AI. It has not made me more intelligent. It has allowed me to communicate the intelligence I already had. I can speak my thoughts, challenge the result and revise the words until they express what I actually mean.
AI did not create my voice. I always had one. It gave that voice a route onto the page.
I can now produce a 1,000-word piece in ten hours and revise it forty times. Before AI, the same task could take me more than forty days.
That matters to me personally. But the possibility is much larger than just dyslexic businessmen.
AI will help people express intelligence that conventional systems have failed to recognise because they are neurodivergent, speak a less widely understood language or live far from centres of opportunity.
This became real to me when I thought a few days ago about a journey I made to Papua New Guinea in 2019. I had wanted to visit PNG since childhood. My mother studied anthropology and filled my imagination with stories of societies that had developed far from the institutions and assumptions that shaped my own life.
On the journey I travelled in 2019 along the coast, into the highlands and through river valleys. The country was beautiful, dangerous, surprising and deeply moving. I was struck by the people there: intelligent, curious, resourceful and ambitious for their community.
Papua New Guinea is home to more than eight hundred languages. Many are spoken within small communities and remain primarily oral. Think of the knowledge, memories, arguments and stories held in them.
However, for centuries, participation from the poorer nations in the global economy has been on our terms. Learn our languages. Attend our universities. Pass our examinations. Write in forms we recognise. Become like us, and then you can compete with us.
AI could begin to change that. Someone speaking a language understood by only a few hundred people may eventually be able to communicate an idea to thousands or millions. A child in a remote valley may be able to learn from the world without first abandoning their own culture. People may be able to participate globally while remaining rooted in who they are. That is an extraordinary possibility.
But it is not automatic, and it is not ours to impose. Communities must control what is recorded, translated and shared. AI must not become another machine for extracting knowledge from people and selling it back to them. If it flattens culture, distorts meaning or strips people of ownership, it will increase old inequalities rather than reduce them.
There are harder physical limits too. AI cannot provide electricity, eliminate poverty or build communications infrastructure. Access will remain unequal. People with the best technology may gain the most unless we make a deliberate effort to spread AI’s benefits.
There is also a danger closer to home. Used well, AI can help us think. Used lazily, it will do our thinking for us. Curiosity, effort and judgement cannot be outsourced. A confident answer may still be biased, misleading or simply wrong. AI should help us ask better questions, not relieve us of the responsibility to question its answers.
The 1944 Education Act recognised that ability was distributed far more widely than educational opportunity. It did not make children intelligent. It opened doors that had previously been closed and allowed overlooked ability to develop.
Britain became more prosperous because children who had been excluded were given the chance to develop abilities they already possessed. The Act did not abolish inequality. But it helped change who was allowed to participate.
AI may do something similar on a global scale. That is the real promise. Not by making everyone the same. Not by removing the need for education or hard work. Not by guaranteeing success. But by removing some of the barriers between intelligence and expression.
History may remember AI as the technology that made already productive people more productive. I hope it remembers something more important. That it allowed neurodivergent people to express ideas previously trapped inside them. That it allowed people to communicate across languages and cultures without surrendering their identities. That it allowed ability to be recognised where conventional systems had failed to see it.
Human potential is everywhere. The opportunity to express it is not. AI may narrow that gap on a truly global scale.
Guy Hands is the Founder of private equity firm Terra Firma.
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