Where Tech and AI Are Headed Next
From digital labor and crypto-powered agents to re-industrialization and privacy battles, the next economic era is forming. Open AI, automation, and resilient energy will define who leads it.
Rollup of what the top tech companies and VCs have been talking about over the last month. I find the convergence fascinating; guides an internal reflection of where to position oneself for maximum relevance. Reminds me of Wayne Gretzky's famous quote, "Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been"
AI Agents → “Digital Labor”
Automating multi-step work compresses weeks of effort into minutes, reshaping software's business model. AI is evolving from UX add-ons to full agents that sell “digital workers,” and adoption is already outpacing early cloud uptake.
Open vs. Closed AI Stack
Control of foundational models will decide who owns the next internet. Widespread availability of open-source models is framed as an existential counterweight to Big-Tech centralization.
Crypto Rails for Autonomous Agents
Machine-to-machine commerce needs frictionless money movement. Stablecoins and smart-contract treasuries already enable AI agents to hold assets and transact programmatically.
Talent & Capital Concentration
Speed is a moat: early movers parlay know-how into sky-high valuations. Weak non-competes in California fuel a hyper-transactional talent market and a flight-to-consensus by investors.
Next Industrial Wave: Robots & Hardware
AI is poised to leap off the screen and rebuild factories. AI-powered robotics could spark U.S. re-industrialization and middle-class job growth reminiscent of the mid-20th century.
Energy & Infrastructure Bottleneck
Compute-hungry AI needs abundant, resilient power. A decentralized grid—solar, batteries, small-modular reactors—plus AI load-forecasting is painted as a national-security imperative.
Toward True AGI
Scaling alone isn't enough; new learning paradigms are emerging. Progress on ARC via test-time adaptation hints at early “fluid intelligence,” but ARC-2 scores show big leaps still required.
Multimodal Models & Beyond-Human Tasks
Vision-capable models will replace point-and-click with see-and-do interfaces. Gemini's native multimodality enables hour-long video reasoning, foreshadowing bidirectional audio-video UX as the default.
The Coming “Content Collapse”
Answer-first search UIs threaten the long tail of the web. Brands must optimize for share-of-voice in AI answers; micro-page SEO and prompt engineering become the new marketing stack.
Ubiquitous Surveillance vs. Privacy
Cheap sensors plus AI create a default panopticon. Doorbell-cam data sharing and viral sleuthing show how personal data can be weaponized, underscoring the need for new digital-rights frameworks.
Big Picture
Autonomous software, programmable money, and decentralized energy are converging. Whoever masters open, agentic AI paid in crypto and powered by resilient grids will shape the next economic era—while societies scramble to update talent pipelines, legal regimes, and privacy norms to keep pace.