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Predictions on AI (2026–2060)

richardren.substack.com · 4,121 words · saved by 2 readers

“AI is going to change everything.” It’s a phrase you might hear in boardrooms, schools, on Wall Street, and at dinner tables across the country. And of course it’s all you hear in Silicon Valley. The refrain is unfortunately not very useful, since the conversation about AI’s future is operating on two entirely different scales of imagination. When most people hear that “AI is going to change everything,” they envision a 2030s world of automated customer service, AI-assisted coding, and perhaps the need for some workers to retrain to more relevant roles. Their mental picture of “AGI” feels like ChatGPT++. Perhaps AI assistants will schedule all our meetings. Maybe NVIDIA’s stock price will rise. When we use the term “AI is going to change everything,” we imagine something more exotic. In a handful of years, we believe AI will obviously, unceremoniously surpass almost all human intellectual labor, even on messy, long-horizon work. From there, the real question turns to when superhuman s

“AI is going to change everything.” It’s a phrase you might hear in boardrooms, schools, on Wall Street, and at dinner tables across the country. And of course it’s all you hear in Silicon Valley. The refrain is unfortunately not very useful, since the conversation about AI’s future is operating on two entirely different scales of imagination. When most people hear that “AI is going to change everything,” they envision a 2030s world of automated customer service, AI-assisted coding, and perhaps the need for some workers to retrain to more relevant roles. Their mental picture of “AGI” feels…

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