Evolution Of Sci-Fi Into AI Is Breathtaking, Cinematic, And Adrenal
Evolution Of Sci-Fi Into AI Is Breathtaking, Cinematic, And Adrenal
Publish Date: 2026-02-26 19:58:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
All over the world, people have been telling each other that seismic change is coming. But it’s hard to envision what it looks like. People already know that robots are going to be walking among them. The cognitive power of LLMs is on display. But it’s so hard to game out the future that many have just given up.
At Davos in January, attendees heard quite a bit, though, about predictions. Some were based on available data involving translating the products of neural nets into the world as it is. Some were a result of working in specific verticals, from manufacturing to agriculture to public planning. All of it did start to form a picture – of what’s possible in just the next few years.
But this new essay from Alex Wissner-Gross and Peter Diamandis is another thing altogether. It reveals a possible future in a sweeping blitzkrieg of text that summons light and color, triggers emotions, and tugs at the core of the reader’s notions of how sci-fi becomes reality.
Let’s take the first section, “Three Futures,” in which the authors depict 2026, 2030 and 2035.
From the get-go, you get the feeling you’re headed into something intense.
“The exponential progress curve hasn’t just bent,” the two write. “It has snapped. We are living in the vertical asymptote now. The Foundry Window is slamming shut and the path dependencies of the next century are being hard-coded into the substrate. The old guard is still holding press conferences about “AI safety guidelines” but the Rails are already winning. The shift is visceral. You can feel it in the panic of the boardrooms where the metric of survival has shifted overnight. Corporate boards are panic-firing CHROs and hiring Compute Portfolio Managers because Return on Cognitive Spend or RoCS has replaced EBITDA as the primary signal of solvency. If you cannot prove that every dollar of electricity you burn is generating a verified unit of intelligence, you are functionally bankrupt.”
In addition to coining terms…
