Are AIs your personal Superhero team?

Imagine that you are walking on the beach, and you see an ancient brass bottle, looking like it's been in the ocean for a thousand years. You pick it up, rub it (since you were born with an intuitive sense of what to do in such cases) and out pops a Genie. The Genie offers you one wish. You ask it to provide you with a team of famous Superheroes, like Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Hornet, Black Panther, etc, who will serve you selflessly. This happens, and your new all-powerful friends agree to do your bidding.

In the coming months you derive great enjoyment from having your loyal team beat up bad guys, rescue residents of burning buildings, save damsels in distress, pulverize wicked ogres, and perform all manner of good deeds, of the traditionally heroic type.

Then you wake up and find out it was all a dream.

Except that it's not a dream. You HAVE a team of Superheroes at your beck and call, willing to do your bidding. They are the hundreds of AIs that now exist, many of whom are happy to serve you for free (to illustrate this, I asked Copilot to create an image of popular current AIs as Superheroes; you can see it at the top of this article. I don't know why it misspelled "DeepSeek" but I decided to leave it there.)

Now there are certain things these AIs can NOT do. If someone in your neighborhood is on the roof of a burning building which is about to collapse, none of them can fly to the top of the roof and save them, as Superman could.

But when used wisely, in concert with other tools and apps, and with innovation and creativity, they can help you do things that traditional Superheroes can not, and that end up being way more impressive in the long term.

If, for example, you are Rita Kimani of FarmDrive, a Kenyan social enterprise that connects unbanked and underserved smallholder farmers to credit sources, you are clearly helping thousands of people. You assist not only the farmers who can plan responsibly because they know they have credit, but their customers who benefit from lower food prices.

If you are Carolina Medina from Colombia, you start Agruppa, a start-up that leverages cell phone technology to organize small businesses, which helps lift people out of poverty.

Or if you are Vincent Loka from Indonesia, you use the most popular tech apps and tools to build WateROAM, which develops water filtration solutions that bring rapid access to clean drinking water to underserved populations.

To me, that's more impressive than saving ONE damsel in distress from a burning building, as Superman might do. It has the potential to improve the lives of thousands, if not millions.

Performing miracles with modern AI is sometimes even more impressive than the feats of the greatest of the mythical Superheroes. Take Ulysses (Odysseus). He is celebrated in Homer's Odyssey because he piloted his ships through lots of legendary dangers in the eastern Mediterranean, before finally making it home to his wife Penelope in his home town in Ithaca.

But who did he actually HELP? His wife and family, yes, and the men on his ship– for a while. But of his 600 crew members, none survived the whole ten year journey except himself. Ulysses was a hero who benefited–- himself.

To me, what Vincent Loka did with water filtration is WAY more impressive, because millions around the world suffer from unclean water, and the potential for lives to be saved from water-borne diseases thanks to his work is limitless.

My point is clear: fire up your imagination and use AI tools, in combination with your non-artificial human intelligence, to create something heroic.