Dateline: September 18 2037
If you can’t tell the difference, there is no difference. These were the chilling words that heralded an era of intelligent machine creations that rivalled human output. Whether it’s layouts, graphic design, short videos or background music, if you can’t tell the difference between work produced by humans or computers then there is no difference.
Which is all very well for things that rely on established patterns, rules and rhythms. But soon it evolved to higher level skills anything that can be taught or learnt, like driving a car, flying a plane, landing a rocket, performing surgery and designing molecules. The machines have become better than humans; safer, more efficient, quicker, cheaper.
It’s all very well saying computers don’t have empathy, or emotions, or real human understanding, that they can’t replicate intuition or instinct. They don’t have to. They’re digital. They can write code. Which brings us to that most digital of all human endeavours: finance. While markets are driven by rational and irrational human needs, desires, expectations and perceptions of value, the financial system runs on digital platforms. And those have evolved to be beyond the understanding of most humans. But not computers.
We’ve gone to great lengths to secure our financial assets and instruments and digital identities. But intelligent machines have been trained to emulate human behaviour, even impersonate people. If you can’t tell the difference, there is no difference. And if an enemy or rival hires an AI-hitbot to get you, it will. It’s child’s play for them to sell your stocks, empty your accounts, hack your credit and your crypto; put you in debt and make you broke.
Your only true defence is a digital fallout shelter, where there’s no internet, no wi-fi, no 6G, no Starlink, nothing. Where you can survive the AI-pocalypse. /First published in Mindbullets September 18 2025
The AI bubble bursts
Tech stocks fall as profits plunge
Dateline: October 9 2028
The advent of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models fuelled a tech boom that benefited giants like Microsoft and Google and propelled chip maker Nvidia into the trillion-dollar club. But now the bubble has burst.
Actually, it’s more like a deflated balloon, the day after the party. The chatbots powered by large language models were so impressive in their ability to understand natural language prompts, and later speech and images, and output well-constructed answers, essays, pictures and video, that experts immediately predicted that generative pretrained transformers (GPTs) would “change the world.”
And they did, but not entirely in the way we expected. Beyond the hype and predictions of job disruptions and productivity gains, pitfalls and problems emerged. Vast datacentres were built to power this wondrous new technology, requiring multi-billion-dollar investments and gigawatts of power.
Microsoft was forced to resuscitate Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant. Google poured billions into its attempt to put AI into every product, and OpenAI sucked up funding. While Meta and Tesla/X joined the party, Apple waited for the dust to settle before gradually introducing “Apple Intelligence” AI into its systems.
The AI boom was real, and despite teething problems like “hallucinations”, a raft of new applications, tools and smart processes were unleashed for knowledge workers and service industries. But in the final analysis the economics of AI investment are proving to be disappointing. Microsoft and Google have rebuilt their entire corporations around AI, and are struggling to show long-term returns, while Apple’s more sanguine approach is paying dividends.
Companies that went all in on AI to reduce headcount and boost productivity are also counting the cost. You see, AI is very good at playing games, driving cars, bringing avatars to life and optimising schedules, but not much good at negotiating peace treaties, securing trade deals, preventing pandemics, inspiring followers or predicting market behaviour.
The party might be over, but AI has powered a new wave of tech innovation, just like electricity and the internet. And the future has changed, forever. /First published in Mindbullets October 10 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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