It's All Going On: Business And Society In The Next Few Years

Forbes

2 days ago

To say that there's a lot going on in AI is something of an understatement. Many people less connected to the industry are ignoring its potential at their peril. The technology is due to upend almost everything we know about the supremacy of human capabilities.
I'm still sort of pondering a lot of what came out of a recent long essay post on Less Wrong that I started covering last week.
The author, who we will call by their handle, L Rudolph L, or simply, for the purposes of this, 'L', brings forth an amazing trove of insights into what life might look like from 2025 through, say, 2029, and as I've said before, these are not vague ambiguous predictions.
So let's go through more of how this poster envisions the next part of the AI age playing out.
There's a good bit in here about business outcomes.
For example: as contenders go for the consumer market, what is OpenAI's moat?
L answers this by saying that the company will be 'especially vulnerable, since they rely heavily on consumers, and are also increasingly a product company that competes with products built on their API.'
The author's take on the company's likely strategy goes like this:
'Their strategy (internally and to investors, though not publicly) is to be the first to achieve something like a drop-in agentic AI worker and use that to convert their tech lead over open source into >10% of world GDP in revenues. They've raised tens of billions and make billions in revenue from their products anyway, so they can bankroll these efforts just fine.'
Meanwhile, the author calls Anthropic a 'jewel of model quality' and a 'Mecca of technical talent', in some great alliteration, while suggesting that XAI and DeepSeek will be the open source leaders. As for winners and losers, here's the take:
'Investors want to see 'real AGI', not just post-scarcity in software. Google DeepMind's maths stuff and xAI's engineering stuff are cool; OpenAI and LLMs are not. Amazon's AWS & physical store is cool, Google Search and Facebook are not.'
There's another side point where L talks about 'selling shovel,' or, presumably, the role of infrastructure, and points to Nvidia's success as ongoing in some way, shape or form.
We've seen Nvidia stock slump over the last few weeks, but the jury is still out on what that company will look like a couple of years from now.
Noting that the progress of AI professionalism might be slowed by human bureaucracy, L Rudolph L nevertheless predicts that AI will learn to perform the role of a physician, and an attorney.
Eventually, the human in the loop that the author posits will be mainly relegated to tedious small tasks and data entry, as well as anything that's too sensitive for AI to handle upfront, for instance, certain kinds of verification and authorization tasks.
Consider, if you will, the prophetic visions of call centers:
'A surprisingly retro success is call centers of humans who are ready to jump in and put an AI agent back on task, or where AI agents can offload work chunks that are heavy on trust/authentication (like confirming a transaction) or on button-clicking UI complexity (like lots of poor legacy software), to human crowdworkers who click the buttons for them, while the AI does the knowledge/intelligence-intensive parts of the job on its own.'
On a sidenote, L also imagines the Nobel prize might be contested between a human and an AI.
I liked this part (italics mine):
'Credit for the Nobel Prize is the subject of much discussion, but eventually (in 2030) ends up split between Demis Hassabis, one of the physicists who was most involved, and the most important AI system. Everyone has Opinions.'
Theorizing that the Communist Chinese Party unveiled its 15th five year plan in 2026, L also talks about the rivalry between the two major empires – the middle kingdom in Asia, and America in the west. The author also notes that companies like Huawei may be close on Nvidia's heels.
The American industry and government, L notes, will be likely focusing on strategies to contain China and prevent it from getting key technologies to dominate the global market and pursue espionage goals.
'There's increasing demand for really air-tight software from a US defense establishment that is obsessed with cyber advantage over especially China, but also Russia, Iran, and North Korea,' L writes.
There's even a part where L suggests that human populations will decline because people will be choosing to spend time with their robotic companions instead of other flesh and blood humans, whereby the old manual system of procreation may take a backseat.
Besides a trend toward human-AI romances, L also goes into some of how the rank and file may react to these changes. The author talks about 'ChatGPTese' as the noticeable product of the LLM to human audiences. Here's the take on what's likely to happen with AI fakers calling humans on the phone or whatever interface is predominant:
'AI scam calls with deepfaked audio and video start being a nuisance by mid 2025 but are mostly reined in by a series of security measures pushed by platforms (and by regulation in the EU), people creating new trust protocols with each other ('what's our secret passphrase?'), increased ID verification features, and growing social distrust towards any evidence that's only digital.'
Basically, L predicts, we will learn to live with normalized AI and what that looks like, as a world with intense automation emerges.
Most of us know this intuitively, are preparing for it now.
But I would think that for most people, it's extremely hard to envision just how this will work.
In any case, do yourself a favor, read the entire essay, and think about all of these predictions as a whole, to try to read the tea leaves on the rest of the 21st century.