The process of technological innovation is accelerating.
McKinsey estimates that AI could add $13 trillion to global economic activity by 2030.
More than $3 trillion has been committed off balance sheet by nine leading technology companies, much of it for AI infrastructure, on top of roughly $600 billion in disclosed capital expenditures.
Nvidia's Data Center business just reached $89 billion in quarterly revenue, up 117% in one year.
William Blair estimates that humanoid robots could eventually perform $3.8 trillion to $5.4 trillion worth of physical labor annually in the United States alone.
Artificial intelligence is becoming an accelerator of that change.
AI is increasingly being used to write software, design semiconductors, conduct research, discover drugs and materials, operate autonomous systems and control robots.
Anthropic recently demonstrated automated AI researchers that could search literature, propose solutions, conduct experiments, evaluate results and improve their approaches with limited human involvement.
That creates a powerful feedback loop:
Better semiconductors → more compute → better AI → faster research and engineering → better technology → better semiconductors.
And AI isn't advancing alone. Semiconductors, photonics, AI and robotics increasingly reinforce one another, connecting compute, communication, intelligence and physical labor.
Five years from now, AI agents will routinely perform autonomous cognitive work. AI researchers will work alongside human scientists and engineers. Robots will perform increasingly useful physical work.
Ten years is much harder to imagine.
The hardest thing about predicting 2036 may be knowing how much faster technology itself will be changing by then.
There are limits.
AI capability can improve in months, but fabs and power infrastructure take years to build. Data centers require enormous resources. Robots must be manufactured in the physical world.
Technological acceleration will not continue without friction. The bottlenecks will move—from compute to memory, packaging, networking, electricity, manufacturing and political permission to build.
The Industrial Age made physical power scalable.
The Information Age made information scalable.
The Intelligence Age is making intelligence scalable.
Scalable intelligence will do something even more consequential: participate directly in creating the next generation of technology.
The defining change of the next decade will be how powerful technology becomes.
And the scale at which it changes our lives is difficult to imagine, express in words or quantify.
JeffreyLCooper.com
Technology Analyst & Author
When Machines Begin to Dream amazon.com/dp/B0H85WBVC8
★★★★★ “A rare sci-fi novel that kept me glued to its pages from beginning to end.” — Readers’ Favorite
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