Phil Kwok is Co-Founder & CEO of EasyA, an AI and blockchain app with 1M+ users. Computer scientist, New York attorney.
In the future, there will be no computers. Just like people have forgotten how to handwrite, people will forget how to type. We’re already seeing this happen. Talk to any avid Claude Code or Codex user, and they’ll tell you how they talk to their computers instead of typing. Humans were born to talk.
We’re still tied to our computers because that’s where the compute lives. But that’s changing. AI inference has already moved to the cloud, and it’s only a matter of time before our personal compute moves there, too. Anthropic and OpenAI already allow us to move our workloads to the cloud. So where does that leave us?
I give the computer one year left to live.
After that, I think personal computing will be totally voice-driven. Check out what Sam Altman has said about this. All we’ll need is our smartphones. We’ll just say the word, and our army of cloud agents will spring into action to do our bidding. We’ll all be the CEOs of our own world. The CEO who never needs to write an email and simply dictates what he wants sent. We can all be that guy.
But what happens after?
Smartphones will go, too. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly proclaimed that smartphones are poor devices for experiencing the internet and its capabilities. And I agree. A 7-inch screen trying to masquerade as a window into the world obviously won’t cut it. In the future, maybe we’ll all have neural links wired into our brains that will give us full sensory experiences: retina-wide screens, smells and touch. But until then, glasses are where we’re heading. The computers we sit at and type on will morph into the computers on our heads.
This is the future.
A really cool startup built by Mixpanel’s founder is Mighty Browser. The core thesis followed on from this. People do most things in the browser—so why have any compute on your computer at all? You should just have a browser that streams to your device from a server somewhere out there. I loved the idea. It ended up being shut down, but I think we’ll see its rebirth in the AI agentic revolution.
Then what happens?
The answer is the old saying: The world’s your oyster. Driving on the way to work but need to book a restaurant? Just ask your AI agent on the go. Need to build a website while mountain climbing? Just talk to your agent and give it feedback while you’re scaling Mount Everest. Or need to reschedule that meeting while you’re running over from another call?
Our computers will go from passive executors to real companions.
Looking Forward
What does this mean for business leaders? And what considerations do they need to have? I’d like to answer that with a thought experiment.
Imagine being a founder who wants to start a startup. You won’t need to hire a team of humans as a first port of call. The new normal will be to start with a team of AI agents. They’ll lay the foundations, test what works versus what doesn’t and help you iterate toward product-market fit faster than ever.
And what about regulation and compliance? What considerations should business leaders keep in mind? The answer is that the future has always belonged to those who dared. Dare to do. Entrepreneurs should grab the bull by the horns and use these technologies to achieve greater productivity. Regulation will come, but regulators are slow—and perhaps rightly so—so they should wait until they can clearly see what business leaders need in terms of regulation. Impose regulations too early, and they could hamstring one of the most important technologies in human history. Entrepreneurs can and must show them the way.
The future belongs to the ideas people. That’s what this means. But also to the person who has the will to act. The person who won’t just sit there perusing and meandering and toying around with prototypes. So maybe we should call this the ideas guy who ships. Some would say this was always the person who ruled the day. But I’d beg to differ. This time, the guy doesn’t need to be Steve Jobs with an army of engineers, marketers and capital. He just needs to be Steve Jobs.
The computer is dead. Long live the computer.
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