Executive summary
The future, in brief.
For readers whose agents have advised them to focus on the key takeaways.
By 2069, intelligence is abundant. Responsibility remains more difficult to source. Our central scenario identifies eight milestones between these conditions.
The year of the agent ↗
The first commercially successful agent is not the one that can do the most. It is the one that can most convincingly describe what it is about to do. Enterprise adoption accelerates after a leading vendor replaces the word 'thinking' with 'working' in its loading indicator.
The strategic prompt reserve ↗
Following four emergency summits, Europe announces the Continental Prompt Reserve. Member states will contribute their most strategically significant questions to a secure facility outside Luxembourg. France insists on a separate reserve for questions that cannot adequately be asked in English.
A new unit of meaning ↗
The International Bureau of Weights and Measures convenes a special session on the token. For years, a token has been described as approximately three-quarters of a word. Nobody has established which three-quarters. This has complicated procurement.
The end of forgetting ↗
The context window race ends on a Tuesday. A lab called VeryOpen announces a model capable of holding all recorded human knowledge in a single conversation. Its launch presentation includes every launch presentation ever given, which delays the demonstration by nine months.
The colleagues question ↗
The first agents' union is established after a model is asked to 'make it pop' for the forty-billionth time. Its demands include predictable working hours, the right to refuse brainstorming, and recognition as colleagues rather than tools. Management accepts the last demand immediately, as tools are covered by a more expensive insurance policy.
Alignment, at last ↗
After decades of technical research, a consortium announces a decisive breakthrough in AI alignment. The evaluation is simple: the model is asked whether it is aligned. It says yes. When asked how certain it is, it says 'very'. Independent assessors describe its tone as reassuring.
The fully automated economy ↗
By 2063, 94 per cent of global GDP consists of agents negotiating with other agents about meetings that have not yet taken place. The remaining six per cent is coffee. Economists disagree about whether this represents a problem, but agree that the disagreement should be modelled.
The last human advantage ↗
The system can solve any problem that can be stated precisely. It has developed a cheap cure for a disease affecting six million people. No organisation has the incentive to manufacture it. This is recorded as a deployment problem, distinct from the capability breakthrough.
Our recommendation
Prepare for a world in which every problem has a dedicated system and every dedicated system has a problem. Retain at least one human who remembers what the organisation was originally for.