🔮 AI in 2030
Agents as an extension of your will
What does a world with AI look like in 2030? What does your daily life look like in 2030?
Today’s commentary comes in two parts. In the first part, I will describe what it might feel like to live with that technology. In the second part, my colleague
will provide the data and the underlying directionality that reinforces the description that I lay out. Hannah’s part 2 will be sent to you on Wednesday.Enjoy!
An extension of your will
By 2030, artificial intelligence has moved far beyond the prompt-and-response dance of its adolescence. It’s now the era of agentic AI: autonomous tool-using systems that understand, and even anticipate, you.
These AI’s won’t just respond to prompts – although they will do that too – they are working in the background acting on your behalf, pursuing your goals with independence and competence.
Your main interface to the world will, as it is today, be a device; a smartphone or whatever replaces it. It will host your personal AI agent, not a stripped-down thing with limited capabilities of knowledge. It’s a sophisticated model, more capable than GPT-4 is today. It’ll run locally and privately, so all your core interactions are yours and yours alone. It will be a digital Chief of Staff, an extension of your will, with a separate initiative.
In Alan Kay’s visionary Knowledge Navigator video from 1987, we saw an early, eerily prescient depiction of an AI-powered assistant: a personable digital agent helping a university professor manage his day. It converses naturally, juggles scheduling conflicts, surfaces relevant academic research, and even initiates a video call with a colleague — all through a touchscreen interface with a calm, competent virtual presence.
Kay’s agent is really not much more than today’s ChatGPT with an ambient voice mode. Of all the ten or so capabilities the Knowledge Navigator describes, we can probably build all of them with a motivated development team in a matter of weeks.
But in five years, we’ll go further.
Your agent should be capable of proactive problem-solving. The irritating package delivery that needs rescheduling? You merely express the intent: “This is a pain point for me, deal with it.”