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 The "this is still early" story is already out of date.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?
Early 2023: The Awakening. ChatGPT goes viral. The world discovers generative AI can write, code, and reason. Most dismiss it as a toy or parlor trick. "It hallucinates." "It can't do real work." Meanwhile, early adopters quietly 10x their output.
Late 2023: GPT-4 Changes the Conversation. Multimodal AI arrives. Enterprise pilots begin. Coding assistants prove they're not gimmicks. The skeptics shift from "it doesn't work" to "it'll plateau soon." It doesn't plateau.
First Half 2024: Copilots Everywhere. AI embeds into every productivity tool. GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google's Gemini integration. Developers who resist AI assistance start falling behind. White-collar productivity begins diverging sharply between adopters and holdouts.
Second Half 2024: Agents Emerge. Claude gets "computer use." ChatGPT gets memory and tools. AI stops just answering questions – it starts doing things. Booking flights. Filing reports. Writing and executing code. The assistant becomes an agent. Most people don't notice.
Early 2025: Agent Frameworks Proliferate. AutoGPT, CrewAI, LangGraph, Claude's agent SDK. Developers wire up multi-step autonomous workflows. AI agents browse the web, call APIs, and chain tools together. Still feels experimental. It's not.
Mid 2025: Agent-to-Agent Communication. Your scheduling agent talks to their scheduling agent. Procurement bots negotiate with supplier bots. The human approves outcomes, not steps. APIs quietly become agent-to-agent protocols. Few grasp what this means.
Early 2026: AI Autonomy Goes Mainstream. Personal AI agents with deep system access hit consumer devices. Tools like OpenClaw run locally, coordinate your apps, manage inbox, files, and calendars, execute multi-step workflows across your whole stack. Hundreds of thousands of agents deployed globally – and they talk to each other on their own platforms. Guardrails exist, but viral demos expose how fragile they are.
Late 2026: The Swarm Era Begins. Agent orchestration becomes a discipline. Teams of specialized AI agents – researcher, writer, critic, coder, tester – collaborate on complex projects. Humans shift from "doing work" to "directing swarms." The productivity gap between AI-native workers and traditional workers becomes a chasm.
2027: Cognitive Work Displacement. Multi-agent systems become the default for knowledge work. Research, planning, reporting, competitive analysis – done better, faster, cheaper by AI networks than most human teams. "AI-assisted" becomes the baseline; "AI-led" becomes the competitive edge.
2028: Scientific Acceleration. AI clusters behave like tireless teams of expert scientists. They generate hypotheses, run simulations, call specialized tools, surface real discoveries in materials, biology, energy. Humans choose which big red buttons to push. Breakthroughs that took decades now take months.
2029: Autonomous Creation. Your agent swarm creates a movie, a business, a product. Interconnected agents design, test, stress-test business models, and ship working versions. AI is your director, lawyer, doctor, designer, coach, and CEO. Your role: steering and judgment calls.
2030: Beyond Prediction. From 2026's vantage, we can't honestly map this edge. AI systems exhibit emergent behaviors and coordination patterns we don't have stories for. New capabilities appear faster than we can name them. The honest answer: we have no idea how strange 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.
