Dateline: March 12 2033
That’s the biggest problem with technology. It rules our lives. Some would say it ruins our lives. But what would life be without it?
Technology is the use of tools. Smart birds such as crows will use a simple tool like a short stick to access food, but humans are an inherently technological species. We depend on tools to get through the day, and night, and we use tools to make more complex tools to provide solutions to problems. Innovation.
Two technologies with possibly the greatest impact on society, money and digital, have accelerated exponentially in recent years, transforming the very nature of human existence. How we work, live and play. How we produce, consume, travel and talk. How we learn, grow and save. How we fight and make peace.
The smart systems and agents, and the web of smart devices they run on; the autonomous cars, robots, air taxis and trains; the digital medical machines and science bots; the smart cities we live in. All create the “Smart Society”, with embedded intelligence at every turn, keeping it running smoothly.
Financial systems, built and operated by so-called intelligent agents, are so complex that few humans — if any — fully understand how they work. But they’re quick and efficient, reducing costs and eliminating friction for business and trade globally.
Not that everything is perfect; we all remember the quantum crypto crisis of 2029, when the first quantum hackers hijacked the biggest cryptocurrency blockchain. That was a brutal reminder that tools are just tools. They can be used for good or evil. By people.
That’s the trouble with tech. We’re at the mercy of the technocrats, and have to keep ourselves and our businesses technically proficient, in self-defence. It’s a burden. But we can’t live without it.
• First published on Mindbullets March 6 2025.
Say goodbye to Gen AI — there’s a new agent in the matrix
Dateline: June 7 2027
The tech industry was looking decidedly mundane and mature almost a decade ago. Phones were hotter than laptops and servers in the cloud were quite passé. The biggest thing was — yawn — Big Data. Then Covid-19 lockdowns happened and tech got a shot in the arm.
Suddenly it was about remote working, teleconferencing and ubiquitous broadband, no matter where in the world you were. Netflix, Zoom and Starlink all exploited the new “work and play from anywhere” paradigm, and tech stocks were hot once more.
Next came the launch of ChatGPT and the boom in large language models that could understand prompts and generate content, be it text, code, images or video — generative AI , or Gen AI. For the first time, it seemed, AI was actually useful, and the chatbots were quickly recruited into the workplace, by creators and office staff alike. So much so that when ChatGPT went down it was a global calamity.
Led by Microsoft and Apple, the tech giants fuelled the boom, with AI chipmaker Nvidia being the only hardware manufacturer to catch this new wave in a big way. Then came a spate of new “AI PCs’” — laptops with built-in neural processors and optimised for Gen AI tasks. Tech was once more exciting, everyone needed new machines to keep up with their colleagues, and hardware sales surged.
But like all hype cycles this wave has subsided. Smart chatbots have become somewhat boring, limited in their usefulness, and their tendency to invent “facts” and spout nonsense has tarnished their image, despite obvious productivity gains. Treating Gen AI with caution is the commonsense approach. And watch those ballooning energy bills.
That hasn’t deterred the tech giants at all. Coming down the pipe is a new wave of Agent AI. Smart systems that can leverage the pretrained models to execute on a goal, employing “machine reasoning” instead of machine learning, to autonomously and recursively step through self-directed tasks and processes to get things done. And learning from their mistakes.
Best of all, Agent AI is designed for efficiency rather than brute force, with new systems-on-a-chip that optimise hardware use to get the most operations per watt, rather than per second, bringing smarts back to your laptop and phone, putting you in charge and less dependent on energy-hungry data centres and gigaband networks.
So, say hello to your new “Agent Smith”. It’s the future of your personal matrix.
• First published on Mindbullets June 6 2024.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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