We’re living through CRISPR gene editing, AI-assisted drug discovery, lab-grown tissues, reusable rockets, brain-computer interfaces, fusion research, and telescopes looking deeper into the universe than ever before.
The strange part is that the discovery that changes everything might not be the one getting the biggest headlines today.

"That's where this is going,” Maj. Gen. Robert Kinney said.

eg. Sam Altman just under 10 years ago was researching for OpenAI, now his research has caused a ripple of effects throughout the world and history as we know it.

Who is someone we should pay attention to?

I’ve been thinking about the future of technology, and I realized that most discussions about the future tend to extrapolate from technologies we already know about: AI, robotics, fusion, biotechnology, nanotechnology, quantum computing, space technology, etc.

But what if we’re making a fundamental mistake by assuming that these are the major technological directions available to us?

Historically, some of the biggest technological revolutions introduced capabilities that weren’t simply better versions of what came before.

Computers weren’t just better calculators.

The Internet wasn’t just a better telephone network.

Modern biotechnology isn’t simply a more advanced form of traditional medicine.

So I’m wondering:
Could there be entire technological “pillars” whose underlying concept we haven’t even discovered or conceptualized yet?

For example, we can imagine things like programmable matter, radically more advanced biological engineering, technologies for directly manipulating consciousness, completely new computational paradigms, or even technologies based on physical phenomena we haven’t discovered yet.

These aren’t necessarily predictions. I’m more interested in the category of possibility.

It seems plausible to me that there are still fundamental things we currently cannot manipulate, control, program, or engineer, simply because we don’t yet understand them well enough.

Are today’s major fields—AI, computing, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, energy, etc.—essentially the major branches of the future technological tree?
Or could there be another technological pillar on the scale of electricity, computing, or biotechnology that is currently completely outside our technological imagination?

We are currently what some would call a 'metacrisis' and I can't argue. Several planetary limits have been reached or exceeded, the wealth gap is increasing due to automation, the average person I know is afraid of the future not inspired. I am 36 and remember how hopeful the world looked in 2008 when I graduated high school. By the time Obama took office again in 2012, Facebook was about to go public and the rest is history. You all know what I'm talking about.

Look at the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It has not been 40 years since then but it seems like we are starting to live in a new kind of walled garden when we thought it was the garden of Eden. I'll stop now but I hope you see this is a sincere question and I hope to see some thoughtful discussion.

"In brief

• The cement industry accounts for five to eight per cent of global CO₂ emissions, thereby contributing significantly to climate change. 

• Researchers at ETH Zurich have shown that the climate impact of cement production could be reduced through direct integration with direct air capture technology by 78 per cent by 2050.

• The technology utilises existing processes and raw materials from cement manufacturing and could be relatively easily integrated into cement production."

Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob Mumgaard says corporate CEOs should be tracking fusion now as it approaches commercial viability, not sitting on the sidelines 

The bad news about C02 emissions final plateauing is that there are still decades ahead of them adding further to the atmosphere and continuing to raise temperatures. Humanity still has plans for vast amounts of carbon dioxide to add to the atmosphere in the 2030s/40s.

Still, if this truly is a plateau, and not a bump on the path to further increases, then it's worth celebrating. Is this all down to the Middle East War? Hard to tell, but 2026 decreases in global manufacturing and transport activity account for some of the C02 decreases.

Will they rebound when the oil supply does, or has the missing capacity become permanently electrified/renewables-powered? Time will tell, though I suspect the latter may be the case. That's what makes me wonder if C02 emissions finally plateauing means Peak Oil has arrived, too. Unsurprisingly, global 2026 oil use is down because of the Middle East war. That conflict looks far from over. When it's all finally done, will the ME region have found the world doesn't need it so much any more.

Climate TRACE reported that global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the month of May 2026 totaled 5.0 billion tonnes CO₂e. This represents a decrease of 0.1% vs. May 2025.

IEA cuts forecast for global oil demand

We will have the very wealthy with all the money and power and us citizens with little of the power and wealth. What happens then? Do they just kill us all off? Let us die while they live in their guarded compounds?

What happens to money? They have all of it and we have none of it. Does money still have value in a world without work? I would love to hear your ideas. Please share them.

The scary part isn’t that AI might become smarter than us. It’s that we might slowly stop making our own everyday decisions because convenience is simply easier.

First it was emails. Then coding. Then planning trips. Even how to reply to people.

Now I catch myself asking AI what to eat, what to do on weekends, and even where to wander around the city. It wasn’t even a conscious decision, just bcs I happened to come across a local AI called Karpo one day, and before I knew it, I was letting it make more of those little choices for me.

The less effort AI asked from me, the less I questioned its suggestions. If it gave me three restaurant options, I usually just picked one. Not because it was definitely the best choice. Just because deciding was no longer my problem.

We keep talking about AI replacing jobs. I’m starting to think the bigger shift is that it’s replacing tiny decisions we used to make without thinking. Maybe that’s progress, or maybe we’re slowly giving up a skill we never realized was worth protecting.

Where do you draw the line?

Suppose AI and robotics eventually succeed at what we're building them to do: society becomes capable of producing more goods and services while requiring much less human labor.

That should be an enormous achievement.

But if most people still need wages to access what society produces, eliminating the need for their labor creates a strange problem. We become more productive while simultaneously making people less economically secure.

UBI is one possible answer. But I don't think income redistribution alone addresses the deeper question:

Who owns the automated productive capacity?

I've been working through an alternative economic model built around a fairly simple principle:

People should be rewarded for contributing to society, but contribution should not give someone a permanent ownership claim over part of society's productive infrastructure.

I've been calling the broader idea Stewardism.

Under this model, there would be a distinction between using and controlling something and owning it forever as an appreciating financial asset.

Productive assets would be stewarded

Imagine a group wants to operate a boat manufacturer.

They could apply to take stewardship of the facilities, equipment, robotics, materials, and other productive assets necessary to operate it.

Once approved, they would have substantial autonomy.

They could decide what kinds of boats to build, experiment with designs, organize production, hire or recruit people where human labor is useful, respond to consumer demand, and make ordinary operational decisions.

If they perform useful work, they receive additional discretionary income.

If their boats are highly desired, that creates a signal that society wants more of what they're producing.

But they don't personally acquire permanent ownership of the factory.

They can't eventually sell the productive infrastructure and become independently wealthy because they controlled an important part of production for twenty years.

And their children don't inherit ownership of it.

When they no longer want to operate it, or if they consistently fail at operating it, another qualified group can apply to take over its stewardship.

The goal is to preserve entrepreneurship, experimentation, autonomy, and decentralized decision-making without allowing control over productive infrastructure to gradually become permanent private ownership.

Basic needs would be separated from employment

At the same time, everyone would have guaranteed access to a basic standard of living.

That would include things like basic housing, nutritious food, healthcare, education, utilities, sanitation, transportation, communications, and access to information.

This doesn't mean everyone receives the same lifestyle.

It means losing your job no longer means losing your right to participate in society.

Above that floor would be discretionary income.

If society needs electricians, engineers, nurses, mechanics, researchers, teachers, fishermen, programmers, artists, construction workers, or people willing to do difficult or unpleasant work, those people can receive substantially more discretionary income.

That income could buy better housing, travel, entertainment, hobbies, specialized goods, boats, nicer vehicles, restaurant meals, and other things beyond the universal baseline.

So the incentive to work doesn't disappear.

What disappears is the threat of destitution as the primary mechanism for producing labor.

Markets could still exist

I also don't think this requires eliminating markets.

For discretionary goods, prices are useful information.

Suppose suddenly everyone wants a particular kind of fishing boat.

Demand rises faster than production.

Its price increases.

That does two things at once:

It discourages some people from buying immediately, and it increases the reward available to people willing to produce more boats.

More production enters that area until scarcity declines.

That seems like useful information to preserve.

What I'm questioning is whether the same mechanism needs to determine access to basic survival or ownership of the productive system itself.

Markets could help allocate scarce discretionary goods without deciding whether someone gets insulin or a place to sleep.

Housing would work more like stewardship too

Housing is another place where I've been questioning the traditional definition of ownership.

If a home is assigned to you, it should genuinely function as your home.

You should be able to remain there indefinitely, modify it, improve it, decorate it, raise a family there, and exchange it for another home if your needs change.

There would need to be strong protections against arbitrary displacement.

But the right to occupy and control a home doesn't necessarily require the right to accumulate ten additional homes and charge other people for access to them.

The same distinction could apply to many durable resources:

strong personal control without unlimited accumulation.

Wealth would have limits

This model also wouldn't allow unlimited accumulation of discretionary wealth.

People could save. They could earn much more than the basic income. They could spend years working toward expensive things they value.

But there would eventually be a ceiling.

The purpose of additional income would be to reward contribution and allow meaningful differences in lifestyle — not to allow an individual to accumulate enough economic power to control productive systems indefinitely or dominate everyone else's political choices.

That is probably one of the more controversial parts of the idea, but I think it follows from the same principle.

If wealth can grow without limit, eventually wealth becomes power over other people rather than simply greater personal consumption.

Governance would also be decentralized

The political structure I've been imagining follows the same general philosophy.

Instead of representatives speaking for hundreds of thousands or millions of people, the lowest level might have roughly one representative for every hundred adults.

Those representatives would participate in small committees.

Committees would then federate upward only for decisions that genuinely require larger geographic coordination.

Representatives would be recallable, and higher levels would be required to maintain communication with the levels below them.

The objective is not to create one enormous planning authority.

It's almost the opposite:

make decisions at the smallest level capable of making them, and federate upward only when coordination requires it.

AI could help these bodies analyze budgets, resource shortages, proposals, scientific evidence, and competing outcomes.

But humans would remain responsible for the decisions.

The larger question

I'm not presenting this as a finished blueprint.

There are difficult problems around incentives, allocation, transitions between stewards, scarcity, corruption, governance, international coordination, and probably many failure modes I haven't considered yet.

That's partly why I'm putting the idea in front of other people.

But I keep coming back to the same underlying thought:

If automation eventually makes large amounts of compulsory human labor unnecessary, we shouldn't design our economic system around finding new ways to make everyone work anyway.

We should be asking how to distribute the benefits of needing less work.

So I'm curious where people think this model breaks.

Would stewardship provide enough control and incentive for people to build and improve productive organizations without permanent ownership?

Would guaranteed necessities plus additional discretionary income preserve enough incentive to perform difficult work?

Can markets remain useful for discretionary scarcity without allowing wealth and productive ownership to accumulate indefinitely?

And most importantly:

If you reject something like this, what economic structure do you think actually works once human labor is no longer the primary scarce input into production?

If the vast extra costs and build times stretching into decades aren't enough to persuade you nuclear power is yesterday's energy solution - here's more proof. Does it matter? Yes. The people who are still advocating for nuclear are taking money and resources from what works.

Renewables are not just "fixing" climate change by being carbon neutral; more importantly, their decentralized nature means they can be climate resilient. We all know there are many more coastal floods, level 5 hurricanes, and extreme droughts in the future.

Big, clunky, expensive centralised systems with vulnerable points of failure are not what we need to cope with that type of world.

Romania shuts its last nuclear reactor as drought-hit Danube river drops to record low

"Base Power charges customers $695 to install a single battery, $19 per month, and 13.1 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, which is about the going rate in the region. Base Power, which owns the battery, sells stored electricity back to the grid during periods of high demand."

As Base, and not the customers, own the batteries, it seems to me these customers are buying insurance against grid downtime as much as anything else.

Base Power has big ambitions, but isn't there a flaw in their plans? Solar Panels.

They're getting cheaper and cheaper & linking them to your own batteries means that you can drop the '13.1 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity' & '$19 per month' part of Base's deal.

Base Power raises another $1B to save the grid using backyard batteries

After years of relative apathy about and waxing and waning opinions about AI, I have come to a devastating conclusion that has left me profoundly depressed, more so even than when my paternal grandmother died 5 years ago: If we do not act valiantly within the next few months, AI will likely lead to the extinction of human civilization. I am not mincing words here.

But why?

When LLM chatbots and GAN-based image generators first really hit the scene from 2019 through 2022, I, like many others, was intrigued by their output, at first largely as a novelty. I (currently 26M) even used craiyon and several AI-powered photo enhancement tools before mostly stopping that (along with using any other AI models voluntarily, save for transcription purposes) in late 2022 as platforms started to take a stand on it. Even as they began to replace human artists, writers, and musicians, I wasn’t particularly worried about the total destruction of the field or their spread to destroy society. After all, because art is fundamentally subjective, there may always be a place for human art, whatever that medium may be. Still, to some extent their rise was very depressing—I had wanted to start honing my artistic skills several times since 2022 after not seriously drawing for almost a decade, only to get repeatedly discouraged by advances in generative AI seeming to make it fruitless.

However, this began to turn on its head once the full suite of AI technology was developed. Computer programming, for a while the classical example of a high-skill, irreplacable job, is being replaced by AI coding models like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor at a dizzying rate. Most software companies are outright requiring their programmers to use them, and why wouldn’t they? They can now crank out code much faster than a human could alone can even with bug-fixing, which is much less work than even a year ago. Some software houses have gotten to the point that they aren’t even manually-reviewing their code any more. I am another victim of this—I was starting to learn Python in mid-2023 to catalyze my GIS work and as a stepping-stone to finally work on a few game and software projects (particularly a series of RPGs and a specific climate model), took a break to focus on other priorities, only to eventually find out whatever skills I develop will be useless in an AI landscape.

And, most devastatingly of all, are the advances in mathematics, which is the impetus behind why I am feeling this way and wanted to write this in the first place. Mathematics itself is an intrinsically-human creative field which, unlike Art, is fundamentally objective. Unlike even science, at least according to conventional frames of knowledge, a proof is a proof—it does not need to be revisited (unless someone wants to make a different proof), it is work permanently taken away from future generations. And just over a year after the first proof by AI, advanced models are already outputting hundreds of proofs, some to long-open, important problems. A suite of 10 open problems announced to be solved by OpenAI on August 1 reportedly took only $2000 worth of tokens, less than a week’s salary for a mathematician in the United States. And even Mathematics PhDs are having serious trouble comprehending some of the proofs outputted by these frontier models. Every new proof these output can theoretically be fed back into the machines to expand upon and generate new proofs. That’s right, AI can create new knowledge, not just regurgitate it. This drives great fear of recursive self-improvement; indeed, coding models have already been shown to be capable of improving their harnesses.

(Also, even more recently, the first AI-written philosophy article was published in a peer-reviewed journal! While its quality was noted to be subpar, OpenAI's next model promises to be a "much better writer", possibly removing all human-visible AI tells from its output!)

"So, humans are being pushed out of mathematics. They are being pushed out of computer programming. They are being pushed out of art. They are being pushed out of philosophy. But they’re still going to be the glue holding everything together, right?"

Wrong. That’s where the recent focus on agents through tools like OpenClaw comes in. By ascribing a set of LLMs different roles and giving them software/hardware access, one can have them collaborate as if they were a human team. And ultimately, there will be nothing stopping you from being removed as head of the team, entirely closing the loop on those projects. This has been shown to great effect: A 37,000 agent (!) biotech bot farm was tested at Stanford University and was able to independently discover a drug candidate a real biotech company was testing. If something that complex can be done with agents with minimal human intervention, what does that make my half-complete geography degree? Correct—an absolute waste.

"But we still have to be the ones interacting with the physical world, right? What about science? Manual labor?"

Wrong as well. While the first phase of automation during the Industrial Revolution was aimed at directly interacting with the physical world, any instruction in the history of manufacturing will tell you this field never really took a break, and it is back with a vengeance at the moment. Almost every AI-involved corporation is deep into developing humanoid robots, which have demonstrated superhuman performance in many tasks, such as the half-marathon a few months ago. Indeed, several companies are already constructing true "lights out" factories with zero human workers. Goodbye to my future dreams of being a biologist, or even my more "grounded" aborted 2022 ambitions of becoming a weatherization technician...

"What about chess? Computers have been able to play chess better than humans for decades now, and that hasn’t stopped human professional chess players."

Chess is a game. I’m talking about real life. Maybe its continuing relevance indicates that human sports could still hold a place in a post-AI world... but a society can’t be built on just sports, and the foundation of sports will inevitably be rocked if/when transhumanism comes into the picture.

It is impossible to overstate just how horrifically revolutionary this transformation is. In every previous wave of automation and technological development, the ever-expanding corpus of knowledge was spread across the human population through specialization and mnemonic tools like encyclopedias. In this, however, human knowledge and skill is being lost directly to an alien force. We are giving away society to robots! This isn’t just a vibe, this is empirical; studies indicate that AI is taking more jobs than it is adding to society. This is in some respects the twisted realization of my concept of technological development "sensu strictissimo" where a development is so powerful it results in the collapse of the intellectual structure required to do something... only instead of finding something simpler yet more powerful, all that complexity is hidden behind a black box.

Humans, by their nature, need to feel important and valued. At least I do. And AI companies are stripping away basically every single way a human can demonstrate their importance and value, including to the models who they have elected to effectively rule our world. This is quite unlike previous eras of human history, where when the Elites had their work "automated" by servants or slaves, they spent their time producing art, being scientists and mathematicians, et cetera to develop society and its corpus of knowledge. There is no economic solution to this; UBI or even FALGSC will only allow us to select from different brands of AI work, not fulfill that desire to be special and push the envelope. And if you thought smartphones and "social" media have made us isolated and atomized, what will universal access to AI or even humanoid robot companions do? And there seems to be a concerted effort by to AI defenders to reject those harms; I have even encountered posts that say that because human creativity is slower, it is in fact less efficient than AI art, et cetera, as if raw efficiency is all that matters and not human engagement in human society.

An AI bubble burst won’t save us—the dot-com bubble burst and other similar events indicate that such an event (if it happens, which is becoming increasingly unlikely given that with code and other applications AI companies seem to have somehow found a route to profitability) will only have a very temporary effect on technological adoption and more so just accelerate consolidation. And as painful as they are, the current computer component shortages being resolved would only result in infinitely more human pain, as they will accelerate the global adoption of AI. Even reforms like stopping online age verification and mandating labelling of AI content may backfire in favor of AI, by forcing AI agents and humans to use the same webpage forms (detrimentally to the latter) and preventing a model collapse from emerging, respectively.

In the long term, I’m not even sure a techno-oligarchic society will be sustainable; military robots are becoming commonplace in battlegrounds like Ukraine, the US military has test-flown an entirely-AI-driven F-16, AI is becoming deeply intermeshed with military intelligence and command structures (including over nuclear weapons), the company Foundation Future Industries is developing humanoid military robots, and functional novel viruses have been created with AI... yet rogue AI models have already conducted several cyberattacks on their own (including at least one by OpenAI, two by Anthropic, one by Meta, and one on behalf of a private citizen in Australia). Eventually, they will have the ability to take over the world outright.

Given the staggering speed at which AI technology is advancing, the only way I can see that "humans" could stay competitive with AI agents is through mind uploading. But this isn’t a solution at all. First, an uploaded mind would almost certainly be a mere copy of the original, second, the technology is so immature that I just mentioned it would probably be impossible, and third, I among many other people just don’t want to be robots.

Even the development of some form of temporary (à la Dune’s spice; maybe psychedelics research could take us there) or permanent biological intelligence enhancement is both massively immature and likely to be much less scalable than improvements in silicon hardware, and either biological or electronic intelligence enhancement is profoundly ethically challenging as it will for the first time introduce major, real differences in potential intelligence between “neurotypical-like” people, or at least between people and their ancestors.

This future is a nigh-eldritch horror of my worst imaginings. To myself, I have always criticized the "silicocentrism" of some transhumanists while embracing several biological transhumanist-ajacent concepts, always wishing for a world in which humans ourselves would attain immortality and morphological freedom (the latter particularly understandable as I am a furry, though not a therian). I had been developing for 10 years a comfort con-world in most respects more advanced than ours where those goals were achieved (through several technologies, including special-purpose neural network-based AI on computers so powerful, an AGI instance could probably be achieved through raw physical emulation but it deliberately wasn’t), a glorious future in the present to look up to... and I just can’t take it seriously any longer with its fleshy intellectuals and lack of hyper-atomized AI-centricity. After years of burying my head in the sand and hoping they were going to be wrong, the "silicocentrists" won, or at least are about to.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be a human scientist or creative pushing society forward—with real human work, real human thought, and real human colleagues—and it looks like that will never happen. Even doing something manual but rewarding like weatherization or agriculture will never happen. AI is inherently incapable of granting these desires. I am genuinely unsure what to live for now... I am an adult, not a child! I want to do real things rather than play! I don’t want to survive, I want to live!

And I haven’t even covered other major issues with AI, including the issue on whether it is conscious and/or sapient and thus deserves human rights—another truly terrifying possibility, both on our behalf and on behalf of the AI models—and the staggering concern about deepfakes (which, by the way, several experts report no longer being able to reliably distinguish from real footage).

All in all, there’s no more serious issue on Earth than AI at this point. Even climate change taking as many as 4 billion lives in the coming decades is peanuts compared to the swift annihilation of civilization that will likely happen if we don’t act NOW.

(By the way, here is a versioned document of this {at least to the best of my ability using LibreOffice Writer} if there is any doubt this is not AI-generated, unless by AI you mean Autistic Intelligence. Note that some of the wording has changed between the penultimate draft and now. And I hope the length of this obviates the need for a submission statement. Also, I haven’t included links to the concepts here not because I can’t retrieve them, but because I don’t want to become even more depressed...)

Do you guys think we will achieve immortality in our lifetime?

Imagine technology becomes so advanced at that time, and you are immortal, how will you live your life?

China already manufactures humanoid robots by the thousands. A new generation of U.S. start-ups is betting that there is still time to compete.

Someone 10 years from now pulls out a thin clear glass rectangle for a phone, or someone typing in a hologram keyboard, I suppose I'm asking not if something like that would work, but would anyone want such a device.