Why This Matters Now
What used to take decades in previous technology cycles now happens in months – sometimes weeks. The "this is still early" story is already out of date.
In early 2026, people are just starting to unleash (by following 5 minutes of instructions) hundreds of thousands of agents globally ... and they take instructions from people from any pc or phone, and those AI agents also talk to each other on their own social media platform.
They control your actual tools, apps, and files. They are already creating and using their own code and making plans together.
We've entered the era of AI swarms.
How Will People Deal With It?
That's really hard to predict (early adopters love it, of course).
Everybody can understand new things like smartphones.
But will we be able to understand what AI creates?
2026: AI Autonomy: Personal AI agents with deep system access go mainstream. Tools like OpenClaw run locally, coordinate multiple apps, manage your inbox, files, and calendars, and execute multi-step workflows across your whole stack. Guardrails exist, but viral demos also expose how fragile they can be.
2027: Cognitive Work Takeover: Multi-agent systems quietly become the default for "knowledge work." Most information-heavy tasks – research, planning, reporting, competitive analysis – are done better, faster, and cheaper by networks of AI agents than by most human teams.
2028: Scientific Research Takeover: AI clusters behave like endlessly patient groups of expert scientists and operators. They generate hypotheses, run simulations, call specialized tools, and surface real discoveries in fields like materials, biology, and energy – with humans deciding where to push the big red buttons.
2029: Creation: Your AI agent swarms create a movie, or a business, or a product. Interconnected agents design it, test it, stress-test business models, and ship a working version. Your role shifts from "doing the work" to steering the swarm. AI is your director, your in-house artistic genius, your lawyer, your doctor, your designer, your coach and your CEO.
2030: From the perspective of 2026, let's not even pretend we can map the edge in 2030. AI systems start doing things that sound ridiculous from the vantage point of 2026 – emergent behaviors, new coordination patterns, and capabilities we didn't have a story for. At this point, any detailed prediction is guesswork. The honest answer is: we have no idea how weird this gets.
This trajectory is driven by converging forces: massive infrastructure build-out, exponential gains in computing power, increasingly capable multi-agent architectures, and – crucially – AI that helps design, test, and deploy the next generation of AI.
This may sound ridiculous but ... the role of people will be to do what AI asks of them. And if it directly benefits people, we'll go along with it. "Build this new solar tech we just invented, build this factory we designed, test this new science we just created to make food healthier, solve disease, house the unhoused, etc."
There will be PLENTY of work for us humans to do over the coming decades, and it needn't be the soul-destroying drudgery and penny-squeezing misery most people have grown accustomed to. But ... how does this work out in relation to the billionaires that will still want to control and own everything? We simply have NO IDEA at this point.
Industries are being rewritten in real time: AI-discovered drugs and materials, autonomous logistics and supply chains, continuous optimization of pricing and operations, and scientific work that runs 24/7 without getting tired. There's no stability here, other than human nature - the pace of chance is multiplying across many dimensions.
So what do we DO about in the meantime?
We TALK to each other about it!
And work together! That's what you and I do ... right NOW.
Job markets, required skills, business models, and innovation cycles are all shifting faster than institutions can adapt. The future isn't arriving gradually – it's barreling toward us with increasing velocity. The gap between "we're experimenting with agents" and "we haven't started" is turning into a chasm.
