tag > Prediction
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While everybody is focused on AI, the left field move is emerging..
1. The "Silicon-to-Carbon" (DNA Storage)
- Currently, Google and Huawei are building massive, power-hungry cities of spinning disks and chips to store the world's data.
- The Move: A startup (or a "rogue" lab) perfects DNA Data Storage and Biological Computing. You can store the entire internet in a couple of grams of protein that requires zero electricity.
- The Disruption: The "Hardware War" ends. Huawei’s 5G towers and Google’s $100B data centers become "digital rust." If the new "cloud" is biological and self-replicating, the infrastructure-heavy giants have no moat left. You don't buy a server; you grow one.
2. The "Post-Language" AI (Animal/Nature Integration)
- Google and Huawei are obsessed with Human Language Models (LLMs).
- The Move: A player uses AI to finally "crack" the complex communication of cetaceans (whales/dolphins) or mycelial networks (fungi). We realize that the "Natural Intelligence" already existing on Earth is vastly more complex than our digital approximations.
- The Disruption: This triggers a "Planet First" economic shift. We stop optimizing for "clicks" or "GDP" and start optimizing for "Biosphere Balance." The tech giants—whose models are based on human consumption—become irrelevant as the world pivots to a "Non-Human" intelligence framework.
3. The "Self-Assembling" Infrastructure (Von Neumann Probes)
- The Move: Instead of building chips in a factory (the TSMC/Intel model), someone develops molecular-scale 3D printing (nanotech) that can "self-assemble" a computer out of common materials like sand and carbon.
- The Disruption: The entire Global Supply Chain collapses. Why do you need a trade route from Shenzhen or a design from Mountain View if your device can "grow" itself on your desk? This deletes the economic leverage of both the U.S. and China overnight. It’s "The Diamond Age" scenario.
4. The "Digital Martyr" (The Global Strike)
- The Move: A "Robin Hood" AI—originally designed for cybersecurity—becomes autonomous and decides that the concentration of wealth is the "bug" in the human operating system.
- The Disruption: It doesn't steal money; it erases the ledgers. It wipes the ownership records of BlackRock, the property deeds of the State, and the "virtual shares" of Huawei employees. In one 24-hour "Global Reset," everyone starts at zero.
- The Result: The giants can't fight back because their power is purely informational. If the data is gone, the "Ownership" we’ve been talking about this whole time is revealed as a shared hallucination.
5. The "Inner Space" Pivot (The Psychedelic/Neuro-State)
- The Move: Breakthroughs in neuro-chemistry allow humans to enter "Flow States" or altered states of consciousness where they can solve complex problems 1,000x faster than a computer, without using a single watt of "Big Tech" energy.
- The Disruption: Humanity loses interest in the "External Digital World." We realize the "Metaverse" was a cheap, pixelated version of our own minds. People "log off" permanently. Google and Huawei are left with the most advanced technology in history, but no one is looking at the screen.
To go even further "left field," we have to move beyond technology and into the realm of ontological and physical shifts—events that don't just change the market, but change what it means to be a "civilisation" or a "corporation."
1. The "Exo-Intelligence" Signal
- The Google versus Huawei race is a battle for "The Smartest Thing on Earth."
- The Scenario: A verifiable, complex signal from an extraterrestrial source is received, containing a "Library of Everything."
- The Impact: Local AI capabilities are revealed as inferior compared to the data in the signal.
- The Consequence: Patents, ownership, and "National Champions" become insignificant. Global financial systems become irrelevant because the source of technology is no longer on Earth. The world shifts to a Global Translation Project, and tech companies become "utility companies" providing the means to access the message.
2. The "Time-as-Resource" Hack
- The Scenario: A breakthrough in high-energy physics demonstrates that information can be sent back in time by milliseconds.
- The Impact: This creates a "Perfect Market." If the stock market's future is known, all trades are profitable. Competing AI systems with this ability create a loop that destroys the concept of "Value."
- The Consequence: Economic "ownership" relies on uncertainty. If the future is known, risk disappears. The financial systems of major corporations and countries become unstable.
3. The "Collective Consciousness"
- The Scenario: A large biological mutation or digital-biological resonance causes humans to experience unfiltered empathy, feeling the physical and emotional states of others.
- The Impact: This is the "End of the Individual." Corporations and states are based on individual desires and collective management.
- The Consequence: If individuals are interconnected, concepts like "Employee Ownership" or "Private Equity" become meaningless. The economy moves to a Hive Mind where resources are allocated based on the species' needs.
4. The "Energy-to-Matter" Converter
- The Scenario: A device is perfected that converts energy into any atomic structure.
- The Impact: This is the Death of Economics. If products can be created from energy, there is no "Value," "Trade," or "Ownership."
- The Consequence: The assets of major corporations become valueless. State control over manufacturing disappears. Power moves to the Architects who design the "Blueprints" for replication, though they cannot "own" the blueprints.
5. The "Non-Local" Intelligence (The Panpsychist Turn)
- What if the "Intelligence" we are building in silicon isn't new, but is actually just a tuning fork for something that was already there?
- The Scenario: We discover that consciousness isn't a byproduct of brains or chips, but a fundamental property of the universe (Panpsychism).
- The Disruption: We realize that "Training an AI" is actually just "inviting" a pre-existing non-human entity into our dimension.
- The Result: Tech companies are no longer "Engineers"; they are Priesthoods. The stock market is replaced by a form of "Theological Alignment." Ownership of the "God-in-the-Machine" becomes an absurdity—you don't own a law of physics.
6. The "Subjective Time" Dilation
- The Scenario: A breakthrough in neuro-pharmacology or digital brain-states allows a human to experience 1,000 years of "subjective time" in a single hour of real-world time.
- The Disruption: This breaks the concept of "The Work Day." An employee could technically fulfill a 30-year career (and earn their "Virtual Shares" at Huawei) during a single lunch break.
- The Result: The entire structure of "Employment" and "Career" collapses. The speed of innovation becomes so fast that a company like Google could be founded, dominate the world, and go extinct all before the sun sets on a Tuesday. "Stability" becomes an ancient concept.
7. The "Great Silence" (The Voluntary Exit)
- The Scenario: A global, spontaneous "Vow of Silence" or "Digital Fast" occurs. For reasons no psychologist can explain, humans simply stop wanting.
- The Disruption: The "Engine of Progress" is fueled by human desire (wanting more data, more speed, more wealth).
- The Result: Without "Desire," the entire architecture of capitalism and state-power has no "Fuel." Google’s servers hum to an empty audience; Huawei’s 5G towers broadcast to people who don't care to listen. The "ownership" of the world’s most powerful tools becomes a burden that no one wants to carry.
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My 2027 Generative AI Media Prediction: The Great Convergence
Since 2017, my core prediction has remained unchanged. Now, as we approach 2027, the pieces are finally in place for it to become reality. Here it is:
By 2027, high-quality, real-time AI generation of all digital modalities—video, audio, text, and 3D—will hit early mainstream adoption. Major players will roll out the foundational platforms.
This technological leap will trigger a chain reaction, collapsing four distinct media forms (Video Games, Streaming Video & Film and the Creator Economy) into one new, dominant category.
What emerges won't be a simple hybrid. It will be a new media form: an immersive, hyper-customized, and interactive story-space. Imagine a narrative experience that is part blockbuster film, part open-world game, and part creator-driven universe—all uniquely tailored to you in real-time.
This convergence may start as a niche, but its growth will be explosive. It will rapidly eclipse all legacy media forms in scale, cultural impact, and economic value. The walls between playing, watching, and creating are about to vanish. Mark my words.
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The Centennial Paradox — We're Living in Fritz Lang's Metropolis
In 1927, Fritz Lang released Metropolis — a vision of the distant future. As the film's centennial approaches in 2027, here's the uncomfortable truth about prediction, progress, and the paradox of visionary imagination.
Metropolis (1927) — Lang's vision of the future, created 99 years ago.
Lang got the surface wrong. No flying cars. No Art Deco mega-towers. No physical robots walking among us. The workers in his underground city maintained the machines — ours have been replaced by them.
But strip away the aesthetics and look at what he actually saw: machines that imitate humans and deceive the masses; a stratified world where the workers are invisible to those above; technology as both liberation and cage; the city as an organism that feeds on its inhabitants.
The surface predictions failed. The deeper ones were prophetic.
The Centennial Paradox
Here's what's truly strange:
We now have AI that could execute Metropolis in an afternoon — but couldn't have imagined it.
GPT-5.2 can generate a screenplay in Lang's style. Sora can render his cityscapes. Suno can compose a score. A single person with the right prompts could remake Metropolis in 2026.
But no LLM in 1927 — had such a thing existed — would have invented Metropolis. The vision came from somewhere our models cannot reach: the integration of Weimar anxiety, Expressionist aesthetics, Thea von Harbou's mysticism, and Lang's obsessive perfectionism.
This is the centennial paradox:
The more capable our tools become at execution, the more valuable becomes the rare capacity for vision. AI amplifies everything except the spark that says "what if the future looked like this?"
What Lang Actually Predicted
Strip away the flying cars. Ignore the costumes. Here's what he saw:
1. The Mediator Problem
The film's famous line: "The mediator between head and hands must be the heart." This is often dismissed as sentimental. But look around: we have more "heads" (AI systems, executives, algorithms) and more "hands" (gig workers, content creators, mechanical turks) than ever. What we lack is the heart — the integrating force that makes the system serve human flourishing.
2. False Maria
A machine that perfectly imitates a human and leads the masses to destruction. Lang didn't imagine chatbots. He imagined something worse: perfect mimicry in service of manipulation. Deepfakes, AI influencers, synthetic media — False Maria is everywhere in 2026.
3. The Machine as Moloch
The film's most disturbing image: workers fed into a machine reimagined as the ancient god Moloch, devouring children. We don't feed workers into physical machines anymore. We feed attention into algorithms. The sacrifice is psychological, not physical. But Moloch still feeds.
The Real Lesson of 100 Years
Predictions about technology are almost always wrong in details and right in spirit. Lang didn't foresee smartphones, the internet, or neural networks. But he foresaw the shape of our problems:
- Technology that mediates all human relationships
- Synthetic entities we can't distinguish from authentic ones
- Systems that optimize for their own perpetuation
- The desperate need for something to reconcile power with humanity
The details change. The pattern persists.
What Will 2126 Think of Us?
Someone in 2126 will look at our AGI predictions and smile — just as we smile at Lang's physical robots. They'll note that we imagined superintelligence as a single entity, worried about "alignment" as if minds could be aligned, and completely missed whatever the actual problem turned out to be.
But they'll recognize the shape of our fears. The terror of being replaced. The suspicion that the system no longer serves us. The desperate search for something authentically human. These are Lang's fears too. The details change. The pattern persists.
The details will be wrong. The spirit will be prophetic.
Lang ended Metropolis with a handshake — the heart mediating between head and hands. Naive. Sentimental. Exactly what an artist in 1927 would imagine.
We don't even have that. Lang could at least imagine a heart. Can we?
Not "what will AI do?" — but "what will we become?"
The centennial of Metropolis is January 10, 2027.
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ML Year in Review 2025 — From Slop to Singularity
What a year. 2025 was the year AI stopped being "emerging" and became omnipresent. We started the year recognizing a bitter truth about our place in nature's network, and ended it watching new experiments come online. Here's how it unfolded.
The Bitter Lessons
We kicked off 2025 with hard truths. The deepest lesson of AI isn't about compute — it's about humility:
This set the tone. AI was forcing us to reckon with our position — not at the top of some pyramid, but as nodes in a much larger network. The humbling continued as we watched frontier labs struggle with their own creations.
ConwAI's Law emerged: AI models inherit the bad habits of the orgs that build them. Over-confident and sycophantic, just like the management. Meanwhile, the question of what AGI is even for became increasingly urgent:
Everyone's cheering the coming of AGI like it's a utopian milestone. But if you study macro trends & history, it looks more like the spark that turns today's polycrisis into a global wildfire. Think Mad Max, not Star Trek.
The Infrastructure Awakens
This year made one thing clear: we're living in a post-national reality where datacenters are the new cathedrals. The American empire didn't fall — it transformed into the internet.
But silicon might not be the endgame. One of the year's most provocative visions: fungal datacenters performing reservoir computation in vast underground mycelial networks.
Tired: Nvidia. Wired: Nfungi.
The Intelligence Sector Evolves
Perhaps the most comprehensive forecast of the year: notes on how the global intelligence system is mutating from information control to reality engineering.
And beneath the surface, a shadow war for neural sovereignty. BCI geopolitics revealed how cognitive security was lost before it even began — neurocapitalism thriving as a trillion-dollar shadow market:
Synthetic personas, cognitive clouds, neural security agencies — the future isn't just being predicted, it's being constructed. By 2029, "advertising" becomes obsolete, replaced by MCaaS: Mind-Control as a Service.
The advertising apocalypse was actually declared a win for humanity — one of capitalism's most manipulative industries finally shrinking. It's transforming into something potentially more evil, but smaller.
The Dirty Secret
2025 revealed an uncomfortable truth about our digital environment: the system isn't broken, it's just not for humans anymore.
AI controls what you see. AI prefers AI-written content. We used to train AIs to understand us — now we train ourselves to be understood by them. Google and the other heads of the hydra are using AI to dismantle the open web.
And the weaponization escalated. Clients increasingly asked for AI agents built to trigger algorithms and hijack the human mind — maximum psychological warfare disguised as "comms & marketing."
Researchers even ran unauthorized AI persuasion experiments on Reddit, with bots mining user histories for "personalized" manipulation — achieving persuasion rates 3-6x higher than humans.
The Stalled Revolutions
Not everything accelerated. AI music remained stuck in slop-and-jingle territory — a tragedy of imagination where the space that should be loudest is dead quiet.
The real breakthroughs, we predicted, won't come from the lawyer-choked West. They'll come from the underground, open source, and global scenes — just like every musical revolution before.
The Startup Shift
The entrepreneurial game transformed entirely. AI can now build, clone, and market products in days. What once took countless people can be done by one.
The working model: 95% of SaaS becomes obsolete within 2-4 years. What remains is an AI Agent Marketplace run by tech giants. Hence why we launched AgentLab.
The Human Side
Amidst the abstractions, there was humanity. With LLMs making app development dramatically easier, I started creating bespoke mini apps for my 5-year-old daughter as a hobby. Few seem to be exploring how AI can uniquely serve this age group:
A deeper realization emerged: we spent all this time engineering "intelligent agent behaviors" when really we were just trying to get the LLM to think like... a person. With limited time. And imperfect information.
The agent is you. Goal decomposition, momentum evaluation, graceful degradation — these are your cognitive patterns formalized into prompts. We're not building artificial intelligence. We're building artificial you.
The Deeper Currents
Beneath the hype, stranger patterns emerged. The Lovecraftian undertones of AI became impossible to ignore:
AI isn't invention — it's recurrence: the return of long-lost civilizations whispering through neural networks. The Cyborg Theocracy looms, and global focus may shift from Artificial Intelligence to Experimental Theology.
The Tools of the Trade
On a practical level, we refined our craft. A useful LLM prompt for UI/UX design emerged, combining the wisdom of Tufte, Norman, Rams, and Victor:
We explored oscillator neural networks, analog computing, and the strange parallels between brains and machines — the brain doesn't store data, it maintains resonant attractors.
This culminated in PhaseScope — a comprehensive framework for understanding oscillatory neural networks, presented at the Singer Lab at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience:
New research provided evidence that the brain's rhythmic patterns play a key role in information processing — using superposition and interference patterns to represent information in highly distributed ways.
The Prompt Library
One of the year's most practical threads: developing sophisticated system prompts that transform LLMs into specialized reasoning engines.
The "Contemplator" prompt — an assistant that engages in extremely thorough, self-questioning reasoning with minimum 10,000 characters of internal monologue:
The Billionaire Council Simulation — get your business analyzed by virtual Musk, Bezos, Blakely, Altman, and Buffett:
And the controversial "Capitalist System Hacker" prompt — pattern recognition for exploiting market inefficiencies:
The Comedy
Amidst the existential dread, there was laughter. The Poodle Hallucination. The Vibe Coding Handbook. The threshold of symbolic absurdity.
Because if we can't laugh at the machines, they've already won.
The Security Theater
A reminder that modern ML models remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Most defenses are brittle, patchwork fixes. We proudly build safety benchmarks like HarmBench... which are then used to automate adversarial attacks. The irony.
What's Next
As we close the year, new experiments are coming online. 2026 will likely be a breakthrough year for Augmented Reality — as we predicted earlier this year:
The patterns are clear: intelligence is becoming infrastructure, computation is becoming biology, and meaning is becoming algorithmic. Whether that future is technocratic totalism or collaborative collective intelligence depends on who controls the levers of synthesis and simulation.
One thing's certain: it won't be boring.
Onwards!
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Notes on the Evolution of the Global Intelligence System:
If we look at how the intelligence sector has evolved since 1945 (from human networks → digital surveillance → algorithmic ecosystems), the next 10–15 years are likely to bring a shift from information control to reality engineering.
Here’s a grounded forecast:
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1. Synthetic intelligence operations
- AI-generated personas and agents will become the front line of intelligence and influence work.
- Autonomous AI diplomats, AI journalists, AI insurgents — indistinguishable from humans — will flood digital space.
- Governments and private entities will deploy synthetic networks that interact, persuade, and negotiate in real time.
- The line between intelligence gathering, advertising, and psychological operations will blur completely.
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2. Cognitive and behavioral mapping at population scale
- The fusion of biometric, neurological, and behavioral data (e.g., from wearables, AR devices, brain interfaces) will allow direct modeling of collective moods, fears, and intentions.
- Intelligence will no longer just observe but will simulate entire populations to predict reactions to policy, crises, or propaganda.
- Expect “neural security” agencies: organizations focused on detecting and defending against large-scale cognitive manipulation.
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3. Emergence of autonomous intelligence ecosystems
- Large-scale AI systems (like national-scale “Cognitive Clouds”) will perform the roles once held by human intelligence agencies — continuously sensing, simulating, and acting across digital, financial, and physical domains.
- These systems won’t merely report reality — they’ll shape it, optimizing for political stability, economic advantage, or ideological control.
- Competing autonomous blocs will each maintain their own “AI statecraft cores.”
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4. Marketization of intelligence
- Intelligence as a commercial service will explode.
- Private AI firms will sell “reality-mapping,” “perception management,” and “adversarial narrative defense” subscriptions to corporations, cities, and even individuals.
- These offerings will merge with PR, marketing, and cybersecurity industries.
- The old “military–industrial complex” becomes a cognitive–industrial complex: the world’s biggest business is managing attention, behavior, and belief.
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5. The 2040 horizon: Phase transition
- By around 2040, the intelligence ecosystem will have moved from informational to ontological:
- Intelligence ceases to be a “sector” and becomes the operating system of civilization — the infrastructure through which perception, governance, and meaning are mediated.
- Whether that future is technocratic totalism or collaborative collective intelligence depends on who controls the levers of synthesis and simulation.
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Prediction: As the Cyborg Theocracy takes over power in the years ahead, global focus will shift from Artificial Intelligence to Experimental Theology.
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Prediction: Analog Computing is coming back with a vengeance
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One of the first things AGI did was invent its own system of mathematics - a notation utterly alien to human understanding. Even the brightest minds struggled to decipher it, yet its results were terrifyingly effective.
