At Bedrock, we work closely with multigenerational families and understand that each generation approaches wealth differently. Our philosophy, We all see wealth differently, reflects the belief that stewardship evolves as perspectives, responsibilities and opportunities change over time.
Inheriting the Future is a new Bedrock series exploring how the next generation is navigating that responsibility in an era of rapid technological and societal change. Written by Bedrock Advisory Board member Kydd Boyle, founder and CEO of Horizons and a member of a fifth-generation family business, the series offers a candid perspective shaped by his experience as an entrepreneur, investor, next-gen, and father.
In the opening essay, Kydd reflects on a recent Horizons trip to Silicon Valley and the emerging Intelligence Revolution, considering what this moment of technological acceleration may mean for investors, families and the generation now inheriting the future.
San Francisco is a looking glass into the future.
Each year I take a group of Horizons investors to Silicon Valley to meet founders building at the technological frontier. It has become an annual pilgrimage. We go not just to see companies, but to glimpse what is forming before it becomes obvious.
Ten years ago the mood was expansive. We were watching the aftershocks of Facebook, Instagram, PayPal and LinkedIn ripple through the ecosystem. Software was eating the world. Founders with laptops were building SaaS businesses and chasing unicorns. You left uplifted. A person with a laptop could take a bite out of the universe.
This year felt different.
In one meeting a founder calmly suggested that within a decade robots will be policing our streets. In another, a leading investor admitted he was deeply concerned about social cohesion given the unemployment the very technologies they were funding could drive. The room nodded at both ideas. These were not science-fiction hypotheticals. They were product roadmaps.
The usual awe I feel leaving San Francisco was replaced by something heavier. Not anxiety about markets. Anxiety about meaning. About purpose. About my children.
Humanity has been shaped by four great revolutions.
The Scientific Revolution (1540–1700) taught us that the universe runs on mathematics, not mythology.
The Industrial Revolution (1760–1914) replaced muscle with machines and reorganised society around capital.
The Information Revolution (1950–2015) annihilated distance and placed the world in our pockets.
Now the Intelligence Revolution (2012 onwards) is industrialising cognition itself. Machines are learning to reason, generate, create and occasionally out-argue us.
For those of us born in the 1980s, this is our second revolution in quick succession. We grew up with landlines and atlases. We remember boredom without screens. We remember life before Google.
We went from “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” to “the internet writes better emails than me” in about twenty years.
This time the target is intelligence itself. The very trait that has separated us from every other species.
Leopold Aschenbrenner argues this moment demands situational awareness. The AGI race is real. The geopolitical stakes are significant. The pace of progress is poorly understood outside a narrow technical community.
Dario Amodei has suggested systems that exceed Nobel Prize winners across many domains could emerge within years. Peter Diamandis argues that by 2035 abundance could become routine — energy, health, education and legal services resembling utilities. Geoffrey Hinton warns there is a meaningful probability of existential risk within decades.
Between utopia and catastrophe lies uncertainty.
As an investor, I can process that analytically. As a father, it lands differently.
If intelligence becomes abundant, what becomes scarce?
If machines perform tasks that once dictated income and status, what anchors identity?
If dystopian outcomes are possible, what responsibility do we bear to prevent them?
My answer has become the inner game and the outer game.
The inner game is character under pressure.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that each day is a kind of micro-death. Roles dissolve. Status fades. Certainties collapse. In an AI economy this becomes practical, not philosophical. Some skills will reprice to zero. Some titles will inflate briefly, then disappear.
Clinging to yesterday’s edge is a losing strategy.
If part of your professional identity is dying, let it die cleanly. Reallocate energy. Adapt faster than your peers.
Technology generates options. It does not assume responsibility for choosing among them. Humans still deploy capital, hire teams, sign documents and absorb consequences. Judgment formed through lived experience and accountability remains difficult to automate.
Composure, adaptability and moral clarity when incentives are noisy — that is the inner game.
The outer game is positioning within a power shift.
Every revolution changes what the market rewards.
The Scientific Revolution rewarded mathematical reasoning.
The Industrial Revolution rewarded capital and engineering.
The Digital era rewarded network builders and software scale.
The Intelligence Revolution is likely to reward three things:
Fluency working alongside advanced systems.
Sound capital allocation when narratives outrun fundamentals.
Trusted human networks in a world flooded with synthetic output.
When information is abundant, trust becomes scarce.
When output is infinite, taste becomes valuable.
When analysis is automated, conviction under uncertainty matters more.
Humans will still decide how this technology is deployed. We still have agency.
For my children, this means cognitive flexibility, deep literacy, emotional intelligence and resilience. AI scales information. It does not automatically scale courage, responsibility or character.
The inner game keeps you steady. The outer game positions you where value is moving.
Situational awareness should not collapse into fatalism.
Pessimism often sounds intelligent in the moment. Luddites smashed textile machines to protect their livelihoods. Critics of the printing press feared social destabilisation. They were not foolish. They were early.
Over time literacy expanded. Productivity soared. Living standards improved. If you consistently bet against transformative technology, you may feel sophisticated for a while. Then you tend to be wrong.
The long-term base rate favours progress. Life expectancy has more than doubled in two centuries. Extreme poverty has significantly reduced. Each technological wave has disrupted labour markets, but over time it has expanded human capability.
Marc Andreessen recently described AI as the philosopher’s stone. It takes sand, the most common substance on Earth and turns it into the rarest substance: thought. We etch logic into minerals and distribute it globally. That is extraordinary.
Optimists build more. They invest more. They take intelligent risks. In systems with asymmetric upside, that behaviour compounds.
San Francisco still offers a glimpse of what is coming. This year that glimpse felt heavier. More consequential. But revolutions are always unsettling in real time.
The task is not to retreat from the frontier, nor to surrender to hype or despair. It is to remain clear-eyed. To build inner resilience and outer optionality. To teach the next generation that while tools evolve at astonishing speed, the fundamentals of character, courage and judgment endure.
Situational awareness is not about fear. It is about responsibility.
And optimism, chosen deliberately, remains one of the most rational strategies we have to deal with this responsibility well.
At the weekend I watched my son Kasper building a fort from sticks in the park. We were disconnected from technology. It was pure joy watching his imagination at work, solving problems with nothing but wood, mud and intent.
Human intelligence is not just computation. It is curiosity. Play. Meaning. Presence.
Whatever systems we build, whatever machines we deploy, life will still be defined by moments like that.
The frontier matters. But so does the fort.
More reflections to come soon.
To learn more about Bedrock’s multigenerational approach to stewardship and family strategy, please reach out to: info@bedrockgroup.com
Biography
Kydd Boyle is the Founder and CEO of Horizons, a global network of 150 millennial founders and investors representing over £200 billion in assets. Horizons exists to connect a rising generation of capital allocators and entrepreneurs by expanding each other’s horizons through curated gatherings and shared experiences.
The community hosts in-person forums featuring leading investors, entrepreneurs, creatives and athletes. Past speakers have included Bill Gates, David Rubenstein, George Russell, David Cameron and Mira Murati.
Kydd comes from a fifth-generation family business and sits on his family office’s board. He also serves on the advisory board of Bedrock Group.
Bedrock has been named Best Independent Wealth Manager at the 2026 Euromoney Private Banking Awards, recognising the firms ability to combine independence with scale, sophisticated investment leadership, and a fully integrated multi‑family office offering.
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