Where do we go from here? We proceed without certainty. That is the one thing I am sure of.
Our science fiction is a good guide to what we will build, because technology tends to follow the grooves our imagination has already carved. David in Alien, Ava in Ex Machina, K in Blade Runner 2049, Data in Star Trek and Dolores in Westworld are very different machines. What they share is that each one reflects us. Machines are reflections of our humanity.
We already see glimpses of general intelligence in small places: robot baristas at airports, robots in agriculture and supply chains, and an AI button in every app. Brands should be careful here. People's opinion of a product often drops when they hear it uses AI. AI-free may become the new organic.
The risk that worries me most is a generational skill gap. I grew up opening computers and knew what a sound card was. Many people who grew up with phones and tablets have never had to think about files or folders. Meanwhile my generation is building systems of huge complexity. We could leave behind systems that keep getting more capable but that nobody knows how to run or repair. Then the only systems left to improve them would be the systems themselves.
Expect a global race. Countries and blocs will build their own capability with partners they trust, and Europe in particular keeps losing researchers to other places. Who you work with will matter.
What I hope people do after the talk is simple. Find the people around you who want to think about this, at work or at home, and talk to them about what they are trying. Start a project. Join the conversation, and lead it if you can. Nobody is an expert in all of AI, so claim your own corner of it.
I end every run of the talk with three questions. They work for an organisation and for a person:
- What data do you have that no one else has? Unless you build foundation models, and almost nobody does, your advantage is your own data and how well you know it.
- What do you want AI to do, and what do you want to keep doing? That is the existential question right now.
- How can you augment your abilities instead of replacing them? What could you do with AI that you could not do before?
Since 2024
The skill gap is why I started teaching. Since 2025 I have run vibe coding workshops for around 500 people, most of whom had never written code. I wrote about it in Teaching 500 Non-Coders to Build Software. The talk's title came from an issue of my newsletter, The Next 1000 Days.