AI 2026

I’m not a software developer; I don’t work “in tech”, let alone in Silicon Valley. But computer technology and software has been a major part of my life since using early DOS editions of Word to write essays for school in the 80s. I’m among the group of people born before the internet and widespread consumer computer technology existed, but recently enough to have grown up along alongside all of that technology. I am not a “digital native”, nor a pre-digital luddite.

I am open to new technology, to the degree it’s helpful, and also skeptical, having experienced enough of life to know it’s not always helpful.

I embrace my human nature as a seeker, creator, and user of tools.

It is from this perspective that I look on at the development of artificial intelligence and its impact on our lives as we turn the page to 2026, and the best way I can come up with to communicate where I think we’re at is to the share this quote:

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.
—William Gibson

I had heard about this thing called a GPT prior to 2022, most memorably in a podcast where Tristan Harris explained how they could potentially be used irresponsibly to generate web content like “fake news” or other propaganda at scale.

But at the time there was no easy way to experience it first-hand. It didn’t click for me. It was kinda interesting and vaguely disquieting, but just another bit of information in the stream.

The moment ChatGPT burst onto the scene at the end of 2022, however, its significance seemed clear to me. I remember breathlessly pulling the website up on my laptop and running demonstrations for my family, asking it to generate very specific recipes or essays about historical events. I’d wait for their astonished reaction…

…which mostly never came.

I’d try to explain how it wasn’t a search engine like Google, it wasn’t finding the answers on the web and relaying them—it was generating the response on the fly based on information it had “learned” and reconstituted. We were talking to the computer in plain language.

Still nothing. It still wasn’t clicking for them. It was still just another bit of information in the stream.

Now, three years later, I’ve had similar conversations innumerable times. Over and over again, I’m disappointed to find that my interlocutor is simply not on the same wavelength. I may as well be talking about Minecraft, the relative merits of Microsoft and Google productivity tools, or any other tech topic that most normal people don’t care about.

Except this is not a normal tech topic.

In those three years I’ve gone as deep as my energy, bandwidth, and constitution have allowed into this new world of talking, “thinking” computers. I’ve felt extraordinary optimism and exuberance, as well as deep despair and fear. I’ve tried dozens of tools and thought obsessively about how to leverage them in my life and work (and if I should).

I’ve learned a few things that I feel pretty confident about:

1. If AI development stopped today, the impact on society would still be massively disruptive in a way that almost no one is prepared for.
2. It is extraordinarily unlikely that AI development will stop today.
3. The timelines for a) the pace of AI development and b) the pace of its dispersion through society are very difficult to predict, but my tendency is to underestimate the former and overestimate the latter.
4. To the degree that people are thinking about things like AI’s impact on jobs and employment, most of them are thinking about it wrong; it’s much more about AI’s impact on tasks than on jobs directly.
5. Using AI effectively today is a skill like any other. Your results will be correlated to the time and energy you put into learning and practicing.
6. The market conditions surrounding AI are volatile, reflecting both the enormous potential and enormous uncertainty. Some big bubbles may burst but, like the internet in the early 2000s, the underlying tech is sound and valuable.

If you’re still reading, and you care for my opinion, it’s this: you’re missing the boat if you’re not actively studying and experimenting with AI tools and technology. I don’t mean swapping ChatGPT in for Google and calling it good; I mean intentionally shoehorning these tools into wherever they might fit in your life. Listen to podcasts. Read r/singularity. This is how you learn.

You don’t have to like it (I often don’t like it) and you don’t have to believe in any particular vision of its future. The point is as it is right now, today, at this very moment it is transformative. People out there (like me) are learning to use it to greater and greater advantage every day.

It’s a race.

You can choose not to run the race. That’s a totally valid choice. If you’re not planning to retire to a cabin in the woods and live off the land (or the equivalent) in the next few years then I think the consequences of that choice will be painful. One man’s opinion.

If you care to learn more about all of this the information is readily available. You could start by asking any one of dozens of chatbots.