All over the world, people have been telling each other that seismic change is coming. But it’s hard to envision what it looks like. People already know that robots are going to be walking among them. The cognitive power of LLMs is on display. But it’s so hard to game out the future that many have just given up.
At Davos in January, attendees heard quite a bit, though, about predictions. Some were based on available data involving translating the products of neural nets into the world as it is. Some were a result of working in specific verticals, from manufacturing to agriculture to public planning. All of it did start to form a picture – of what’s possible in just the next few years.
But this new essay from Alex Wissner-Gross and Peter Diamandis is another thing altogether. It reveals a possible future in a sweeping blitzkrieg of text that summons light and color, triggers emotions, and tugs at the core of the reader’s notions of how sci-fi becomes reality.
Let’s take the first section, “Three Futures,” in which the authors depict 2026, 2030 and 2035.
From the get-go, you get the feeling you’re headed into something intense.
“The exponential progress curve hasn’t just bent,” the two write. “It has snapped. We are living in the vertical asymptote now. The Foundry Window is slamming shut and the path dependencies of the next century are being hard-coded into the substrate. The old guard is still holding press conferences about “AI safety guidelines” but the Rails are already winning. The shift is visceral. You can feel it in the panic of the boardrooms where the metric of survival has shifted overnight. Corporate boards are panic-firing CHROs and hiring Compute Portfolio Managers because Return on Cognitive Spend or RoCS has replaced EBITDA as the primary signal of solvency. If you cannot prove that every dollar of electricity you burn is generating a verified unit of intelligence, you are functionally bankrupt.”
In addition to coining terms like Return on Cognitive Spend, the authors centralize something called the Industrial Intelligence Stack (more on that later) as the core of the new revolution in science and technology. Meanwhile, as “2026” gives into “2030,” there are mind-boggling innovations in key fields: in healthcare, “Bio-Fabs” where people can get replacement organs, and the clearing of urban air by intelligent energy handling. When Wissner-Gross and Diamandis say that “the Abundance Flywheel is spinning so fast that the centrifuge of progress is separating the signal from the noise,” they lay this out, in detail, in a way that is actually well-founded on the science that we have today. Sometimes it seems a bit Stepfordish, but you can imagine most of these things happening. In others, it’s not really sci-fi anymore.
Remember the old Dick Tracy tele-screen?
In the 1980s when we read those old comics, that technology was sci-fi. It didn’t exist. We didn’t have the tools to make it exist. Scientists would have needed to achieve it with cathode-ray televisions and landline audio streams.
Then Moore’s law happened, and the Internet was created, and now we can FaceTime on our phones, or Zoom on a laptop. When sci-fi becomes reality, it happens casually. It’s just reality.
But the scenes that Wissner-Gross and Diamandis are conjuring seem so starkly unreal…
“A patient in Tokyo walks into a clinic with a failing kidney and walks out three days later with a scheduled transplant of a printed, autologous replacement that requires no anti-rejection meds. The waiting list is gone. It was an inventory management error.”
There’s a technique that the authors use throughout, illustrating how powerful technologies can make monumental, life-or-death problems into administrative details.
“Energy is no longer a constraint,” they write. “It is a routing issue. The first net-energy fusion pilot has achieved ignition. It is not stabilized by human engineers, but by AI controllers that manage plasma instabilities at microsecond intervals.”
Four Revolutions
This section of the essay where Wissner-Gross and Diamandis break down progressive waves of tech was, I thought, central to the proposed realities that they write about.
“The Scientific Revolution was a war on Ignorance,” they write. “The Industrial Revolution was a war on Muscle. The Digital Revolution was a war on Distance. The Intelligence Revolution, the one we are entering today, is a war on Attention.”
In what they call a “pattern of victory,” the authors bring forth a critical “harness” for each of these stages, where humankind moves a step ahead.
“The Scientific Method was a harness for truth,” they write. “Factory Discipline was a harness for labor. The Operating System was a harness for computation. Today, the Industrial Intelligence Stack is the harness for AI.”
There’s this definition and explanation of societal impact:
“A harness allows new institutions to form. Markets and governments build structures to convert this new power into trust and capital. In the past, these were scientific journals, corporations, and internet protocols. Today we are building Abundance Targets and Outcome-Based Contracts.”
Many of these terms themselves explain how this type of broad innovation could work. Commerce will never be the same. Nor will law, or medicine.
We are at a point of immediate expansion that bewilders us.
Essays like this one can help us to imagine the future more fully, and prepare.