Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
It might be cliche to say, but the future has arrived. First in factories, then in homes! If one thing is certain about our future it is that humanoid robots will be all around us. We’ll have to wait and see how this impacts work, chores, and even social interactions, because there isn’t going to time to think of long term implications before they arrive… everywhere very quickly.
If you talk to people about LLM’s like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, you’ll still hear things like, ‘They hallucinate and will make up fake research’, and something I heard recently, ‘they actually make work harder because workers need to spend more time editing and cleaning up what they produce’. What people who say this don’t realize is that this is pre-January 2026, and we are now fully into February 2026. Yes, things are moving that fast! And furthermore, what most people, including me, have not been paying attention to is that when we use the free version of these tools, we are essentially months and months behind what the latest models can do.
Matt Shumer’s ‘Something Big Is Happening‘, was written just 4 days ago and has already been seen by millions of people. Yes, it’s a bit of a long read, but it is also a ‘must read’. Here is an excerpt:
“Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.”
I recently shared my thoughts on the upcoming ‘Fiscal year end squeeze‘, where I said, “Corporations care about pleasing shareholders and maintaining stock value over caring for the people who work for them. This is the ugly side of capitalism. Eliminate thousands of salaries and suddenly the balance sheet proves to be more profitable. Never mind that these are people’s careers and livelihood that are being cut short. And never mind about loyalty to the company.” What I’m realizing now, after reading Matt’s article, is that the situation is far worse than I thought, because AI is coming after not just these jobs, but almost every other jobs these newly unemployed people will be looking for.
If I was out of a job right now, what I’d be doing is paying the monthly fees for the 2-3 best AI models out there and learning how to power use them. I wouldn’t be looking for a job, I’d be trying to find a niche where I could work for myself, or maybe become a contractor doing things for people who don’t realize that AI is good enough to get the work done faster than they can do it. Because the reality is that the vast majority of people in the world are oblivious to just how fast this disruption is coming, and unlike other disruptions in the past this one is going to happen everywhere and all at once. Most people can’t fathom how disruptive this will be, and even as I share this as a warning… I’m not sure I fully grasp the full impact either.
I was only one-and-a-half years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon just 56 years ago. The computer guidance system was sophisticated for the day, but simple by today’s standards. Years later when I bought the 64k adapter for my Commodore Vic 20 home computer, which needed to be plugged into my television, I had access to more memory than the Apollo.
Today most calculators have more memory than that. So do our fridges, and other household items that really don’t even need it. We routinely purchase more sophisticated items than the computer that landed the first space ship on the moon.
Now we are asking LLM’s that do billions of calculations a second questions and we don’t even fully understand their processes leading to the answers. The sophistication of these tools are so much greater than anything humankind has created before. Few people in the world truly understand the workings of these tools, in the same way that not many people understood what the Apollo 11 navigation computer was doing back in 1969.
So where is this all leading? What technological advances am I going to see in my lifetime? Are we all going to have house robots doing chores for us. Will we no longer drive because cars will drive (or fly) themselves better than we can? Will I go to the bathroom and my toilet will tell me I’m deficient in a certain vitamin after analyzing my poop?
I’m fascinated by how fast we’ve innovated in less than 60 years. I recognize how much faster we’ve innovated in the last 30 years compared to the 30 before that, and it makes me think that if the rate of innovation continues, I’ll see even greater innovations in the next 15 years. That’s the nature of exponential growth and I think that innovation has been far more exponential than incremental.
I spend a fair bit of time thinking about the future… Be it the future of technology, education, health and longevity. In each of these areas I see things changing drastically in the next 15 years. But I don’t have a crystal ball and I’m not sure that I can separate science from science fiction, or innovation from imagination, as I look forward. In all honesty I have no idea how far technology and innovations will take us in my lifetime, but I’m excited about the possibilities.
A couple Fridays ago the school got a call from a guy with an Australian accent. He said he was a former school principal who now does consulting promoting progressive and innovative practices in schools. He said he knew it was short notice but he was in town and could he visit our school. I had time at the end of the day and invited him to visit. He Uber’ed in from Vancouver and after a quick chat we had a tour, talked to a couple teachers, and a few students.
He got to see the tail end of a presentation and hear some of the feedback our students gave. Then we went back to my office for a chat. So I asked him, how did you choose Inquiry Hub as a school to visit? He said that he has been working with AI recently and he had put all the factors he looks for in progressive schools, and asked Chat GPT which school he should visit. Inquiry Hub came up.
I find it fascinating that we were found this way. A chance encounter created by an LLM.
People forget that we were worried about the internet and Google. And before that writing utensils:
“Students today depend too much upon ink. They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil.” ~ National Association of Teachers Journal, 1907
“Students today depend on these expensive fountain pens. They can no longer write with a straight pen and nib. We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world which is not so extravagant.” ~ From PTA Gazette, 1941
I pulled those quotes from a presentation I did 16 years ago. I did another presentation at that time where I shared a quote from 1842 discussing how books would become useless “when the pupils are furnished with slates”.
We are used to pronouncing ‘the sky is falling‘ when the next advancement comes along. Google was going to make us dumber. It didn’t. Smart phones were going to make us dumber, but they didn’t. They did however change the things we thought and still think about, and remember. For example, I used to carry around a few dozen phone numbers, memorized in my head, now I don’t even know my own daughter’s numbers. They are neatly stored in my phone.
AI will do the same. It will adjust what we remember, fine tune what we think about about and ask, and help direct our thinking… but it won’t make us dumber.
When I was a kid, I thought my dad was the smartest guy in the world. I can’t think of a question I asked him that he didn’t know the answer to. Sometimes he’d even bring me a file on the topic I asked about.
I remember absolutely blowing away a teacher and my fellow students on a project I did on harnessing the ocean for power. I had newspaper clippings, magazine articles, even textbook sources that I shared on the classroom overhead projector. It looked like I spent hours upon hours doing research. I didn’t. I asked my dad what he knew and he gave me a thick file with all the resources I needed. He was my Google long before Google was a thing.
It made me look good. It made my work a lot easier. It didn’t make me dumber.
I’ll admit that there is something fundamentally different with AI compared to advances like the slate, the pen, the internet, Google and other ‘technological advances’. As Artificial Intelligence becomes smarter than us, we can rely on it in ways that we couldn’t with other advances. And it will take a while for us to figure out how to create tasks in schools that utilize AI effectively, rather than having AI do all the work. It was hard but not impossible to ‘Google proof’ an assignment, and that challenge is significantly magnified by AI. But the opportunities are also magnified.
What happens when AI can individualize student learning and what we consider the ‘core curriculum’ can be taught in less than half of a school day? How exciting can school be for the other half of the day? What curiosities can we foster? How student directed (and thus more engaging) can that other half of the day be?
We are only dumber using AI if we decide that we will passively let it do the work for us, but let’s not pretend students were not already using ‘cut-and-paste’ to get assignments done. Let’s not pretend work avoidance wasn’t already a thing. Let’s not pretend that we don’t already spend a lot of time in schools teaching students to be compliant rather than to think for themselves.
AI will only make us dumber if we try to continue doing what we have done before, but allow AI to do the work for us. If we truly use AI in collaborative and inspirational ways, we are opening an exciting new door to what human potential really can be.
“The majority of U.S. professionals (58%) believe they have a wide range of skills that are being underutilized in their current roles, according to LinkedIn’s latest Workforce Confidence survey.
This sense of untapped potential is especially strong in certain fields: Nearly two-thirds of workers in the administrative and support services industry (65%) say they’re being underutilized, along by 63% of those in retail and 62% of those in transportation. Education and oil, gas and mining follow, both at 60%.”
To me this isn’t an employee but rather an employer issue. It’s not a worker issue to resolve but rather a leadership issue. I think in many cases the enthusiasm of a worker to be innovative and try new things, which magnify strengths and utilizes untapped skills, are quelled by a drive for consistency and minimum competence. Instead of promoting opportunities for innovation, large companies want to minimize uniqueness for the safety of not taking risks and making mistakes.
‘If I let this employee try this unique approach, other employees will try less effective approaches’. Or, ‘I can approve this additional cost request for one employee, but if others ask it will be unsustainable, so it’s better not to try and end up with cost overruns’. Or, ‘If it fails it will make us look bad’… Or, or, or… it’s always easier to turn down differentiation than to allow unknowns that are not a guaranteed success.
So, innovation is deemed too costly, or too much of a risk, and employees feel like the potential they have is underutilized.
We need to create an environment where ‘Yes is the default‘. Where innovation and failing forward is seen as opportunities to grow… and where those we work with feel like they are being better utilized.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that we live in the 21st-century. It should be getting easier, but it isn’t. All of our schools just got new photocopy machines, and there is a one hour video tutorial to learn how to use them. More videos and instructions are required, if you are the one who is doing any kind of basic maintenance like replacing the toner.
Related to this, when was the last time you bought a new TV and you instantly knew how to use the remote? I find incredible irony that there is nothing universal about a universal remote control. I don’t know, call me crazy, but I would think that in this day and age the tools we use would get simpler to use, not more complicated.
Borrow a friend’s car and try to fill the gas tank and you’re left puzzled as to where the release is for the gas tank’s door. Go to the gas station and there’s a process to get your rewards card punched in, because you don’t have room in your wallet for 17 rewards program cards. Try to connect your phone to that same borrowed car, and you’re worried that you’re going to have to cancel another users profile. Or you are faced with a touch screen menu that just doesn’t make intuitive sense.
How is it that the user interface of almost everything we do now is more complicated than necessary? Why is it that every single place we go to online we’re expected to login or create an account, or at the very least close one or two pop-up invitations to do so? i’m looking at a website for 30 seconds, to find out one piece of information, do I really need to decide whether or not I want to accept cookies?
My microwave has a touch dial where I have to spin my finger in a circle to get to the appropriate time. I don’t think I can ever hit the time I want without toggling back-and-forth. This takes me significantly longer than if I had to punch three number keys on a touchpad and hit ‘Start’. There is nothing convenient about this. And that’s my point…
We live in an era when things should be getting a lot easier, user interfaces should be intuitive and natural to use, but instead everything seems to be getting a little more difficult. I just don’t get it.
We seem to have a fascination with robots being more and more like humans. We are training them to imitate the way we walk, pick things up, and even gesture. But I think the thing most people aren’t realizing is how much better than humans robots will be (very soon).
The light bulb went on for me a few months back when a saw a video of a humanoid robot lying on the floor. It bent it’s knees completely backwards, placing it’s feet on either side of it’s hips and lifted itself to standing from close to it’s center of gravity. Then it walked backwards a few steps before rotating it’s body 180º to the direction it was walking.
I was again reminded of this recently when I saw a robotic dog going over rugged terrain, and when it reached level ground, instead of running it just started to roll on wheels. The wheels were locked into position when the terrain was rougher, and it made more sense to be a dog-like quadruped to maximize mobility.
There is no reason for a robot to have a knee with the same limited mobility as our knees. A hand might have more functionality with 3 fingers and a thumb, or 4 fingers and 2 opposable thumbs on either side of the fingers. Furthermore, this ‘updated’ hand can have the dexterity to pick something up using either side of it’s hand. It would be like if the hand had two palms, simply articulating finger digits to go the opposite way when it is practical. Beyond fully dexterous hands, we can start to use our imagination: heads that rotate to any direction, a third arm, the ability to run on all-fours, incredible jumping ability, moving faster, being stronger, and viewing everything with 360º cameras that have the ability to magnify an object far beyond human eyesight capabilities. All the while processing more information than we can hold in our brains at once.
Robot dogs on wheels are just the first step in creating robots that don’t just replicate the mobility and agility of living things, but actually far exceed any currently abilities that we can think of. Limitations to these robots of the near future are only going to be a result of our lack of imagination… human imaginations, because we can’t even know what an AI will think of in 20-30 years. We don’t need to worry about human-like robots, but we really do need to worry about robots that will be capable of things we currently think are impossible… And I think we’ll start to see these in the very near future. The question is, will they help humanity or will they be used in nefarious ways? Are we going to see gun wielding robot dogs or robots performing precision surgery and saving lives? I think both, but hopefully we’ll see more of these amazing robots helping humanity be more human.
I subscribe to superhuman.ai, a daily email newsletter. Most days I peruse it for about 3-5 minutes before work, primarily focussing on the ‘Today in AI’ section. It’s fascinating to see how the field of AI is rapidly advancing. On weekends the email shifts topics. Saturday is a robotics special and Sundays are focused on scientific and technological breakthroughs outside of AI.
Here are some videos shared in yesterday’s Superhuman robotics focused update:
Then here are 3 sections from today’s email. Two related to technological advances:
Star Power: France just took a massive lead in the race to near-limitless clean energy. The country’s CEA WEST Tokamak reactor has shattered China’s record, maintaining a hydrogen plasma reaction for 22 minutes and 17 seconds flat. While it’s not commercial-ready yet, it’s a major leap in fusion research and has huge implications for the development of ITER, the world’s largest fusion project, in the south of France.
Two-way Street: Chinese researchers have built the world’s first two-way brain-computer interface (BCI). Unlike conventional BCIs that just decode brain signals, this system creates a feedback loop where both the brain and the machine learn from each other and improve at working together over time.
And 3 related to health and longevity:
Cancer Counter: Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering have reported promising results from a small trial that used personalized mRNA vaccines to fight pancreatic cancer. Out of the 16 participants who were administered the vaccine, at least half generated long-lasting cancer-fighting T cells, with early results suggesting fewer recurrences. Researchers estimate these T cells could persist for years, offering hope for a future breakthrough.
Fountain of Youth: Japanese bioengineers claim to have found the ‘rewind’ button for aging. Noticing that older cells were considerably larger in size than younger ones, the scientists discovered that they were packed in a layer of the AP2A1 protein. This led them to conclude that blocking the protein could reverse aging — a potential breakthrough for anti-aging treatments. We’ll believe it when we see it.
Follicle Fix: Research teams around the worldare possibly getting closer to reversing hair loss with a host of innovative new treatments. They’re currently testing a sugar-based gel that could stimulate blood supply to hair follicles, potentially offering a simple, affordable cure for baldness. Also, a new topical gel, PP405, aims to “wake up” dormant hair follicle stem cells, while exosome-based therapies show promise in regrowing hair naturally.
Two years ago, I would have said we were 15-20 years away from intelligent robots living among us, now I think wealthy people will have these in the houses before the end of the year, and they will become even more affordable and mainstream before the end of 2026.
Two years ago I actually believed and shared that my kids would be the first generation to routinely live past 100 years old, barring accidents and rare diagnoses that haven’t yet been cured. Now I can actually conceive of this being true for my generation.
I thought Universal Basic Income was going to be a thing in the 2040’s or 2050’s… Now I look at how intelligent LLM’s are, and how advance robots are, and I wonder how we’ll make it through the 2020’s without needing to financially support both white collar and blue collar workers who are pushed out of jobs by AI and robots.
The speed of innovation is accelerating and right now we are just scratching the surface of AI inspired innovation. What happens when an AI with the equivalent knowledge of 100,000 plus of our most intelligent humans starts to make intuitive connections between entire bodies of knowledge from science, technology, politics, economics, culture, nature, and even art?
In 1985 the movie Back to the Future took us forward to 2015 where there were hovering skate boards. In 40 years rather than 30 we haven’t gotten there yet. But look at the progress in robotics from 2015-2025. This is going to advance exponentially from 2025 to 2030.
If the Back to the Future movie were made today, and the future Marty McFly went to was 2055, I bet the advancements of our imagination would be underwhelming compared to what would actually be possible. While I don’t think we will be there yet with space travel and things like a Mars space station, I think the innovations here on earth will far exceed what we can think of right now.
The open source DeepSeek AI model has been built my the Chinese for a few million dollars, and it seems this model works better than the multi-billion dollar paid version of Chat GPT (at about 1/20th the operating cost). If you watch the news hype, it’s all about how Nvidia and other tech companies have taken a huge financial hit as investors realize that they don’t ‘need’ the massive computing power they thought they did. However, to put this ‘massive hit’ into perspective let’s look at the biggest stock market loser yesterday, Nvidia.
Nvidia has lost 13.5% in the last month, most of which was lost yesterday.
However, if you zoom out and look at Nvidia’s stock price for the last year, they are still up 89.58%!
That’s right, this ‘devastating loss’ is actually a blip when you consider how much the stock has gone up in the last year, even when you include yesterday’s price ‘dive’. If you bought $1,000 of Nvidia stock a year ago, that stock would be worth $1,895.80 today.
Beyond that, the hype is that Nvidia won’t get the big orders they thought they would get, if an open source LLM (Large Language Model) is going to make efficient, affordable access to very intelligent AI, without the need for excessive computing power. But this market is so new, and there is so much growth potential. The cost of the technology is going down and luckily for Nvidia, they produce such superior chips that even if there is a slow down in demand, the demand will still be higher than their supply will allow.
I’m excited to try DeepSeek (I’ve tried signing up a few times but can’t get access yet). I’m excited that an open source model is doing so well, and want to see how it performs. I believe the hype that this model is both very good and affordable. But I don’t believe the hype that this is some sort of game-changing wake up call for the industry.
We are still moving towards AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and ASI – Super Intelligence. Computing power will still be in high demand. Every robot being built now, and for decades to come, will need high powered chips to operate. DeepSeek has provided an opportunity for a small market correction but it’s not an innovation that will upturn the industry. This ‘devastating’ stock price losses the media is talking about is going to be an almost unnoticeable blip in stock prices when you look at the tech stock prices a year or 5 years from now.
It is easy to get lost in the hype, but zoom out and there will be hundreds of both little and big innovations that will cause fluctuations in stock market prices. This isn’t some major market correction. It’s not the downfall of companies like Nvidia and Open AI. Instead, it’s a blip in a fast-moving field that will see some amazing, and exciting, technological advances in the years to come… and that’s not just hype.
