Editor’s Notes: In this thought-provoking TEDxOU talk, Judah Anttila explores the radical transformations awaiting humanity over the next two decades as technology continues its exponential growth. Drawing on predictions from futurists like Ray Kurzweil, he discusses the potential for a “great decoupling” in the economy, the possibility of infinite life by 2040, and the eventual arrival of the singularity. Anttila challenges the audience to envision a future where we move beyond matter to become patterns of intelligence, calling for new philosophies, art movements, and academic disciplines to navigate this unprecedented disruption. (March 24, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
JUDAH ANTTILA: Alright guys, I have some crazy ideas and it’s hard to predict the future but it looks like we may need new economic ideas as soon as 2030. Infinite life may be possible by 2040 and some humans may become patterns by 2050. Now this level of disruption might sound crazy but along the way we’ll talk about the almost unstoppable growth of technology and the feelings of anxiety, anger, uncertainty and amazement we may feel. As well as the creation of new jobs, a new philosophy, a new language and a new academic discipline.
Ray Kurzweil and the Power of Exponential Predictions
So, where are these predictions coming from? There’s from a lot of people but if we could only focus on one it would be Ray Kurzweil. He has 21 honorary doctorates and is the director of engineering at Google and over the past 30 years he’s given more than 147 predictions with, depending on how you want to score it, about an 80% accuracy rate. He correctly predicted the explosive growth of the internet and the rise of ChatGPT and the iPhone in 1999. Now he didn’t call them the iPhone or ChatGPT in 1999 but he said what they would do, when it would happen and then it happened.
So how did he do this? Well he looked at how strong the top computers were over time and what he found was that computation is exponential. The number of calculations per second per constant dollar doubles every year and so to make his predictions he’d take the capacity, then translate that to the number of calculations per second per dollar and then translate that over onto the graph and then down onto the x-axis to find about when it would happen.
Linear Minds in an Exponential World
And a key realization here is this: our minds think linearly but technology grows doublingly. If you take 20 steps linearly you get to 20 but if you take 20 steps doublingly you get to 2 to the 20 which is over a million. And so to make this more concrete, more felt, 40 years ago 1 terabyte cost 4 million dollars. Now we can all go to Walmart after this and buy one for like 40 and it went from an entire room to inside your pocket in the process.
And so we’ve already had a million fold increase in computation, we’re just going to have another million fold increase in computation. And so this curve probably isn’t going to level off anytime soon because even before Moore’s Law and transistors it was a series of S-curves. Once one paradigm would stop, another paradigm would start. And so that’s why people like Ray Kurzweil can say things like, “The next 20 years will have more change than the last 200.”
But honestly, you know, who really knows? But for fun, let’s try to see if we can extend these technological predictions into predictions about the economy and culture, if for no other reason than it’s interesting.
The Great Decoupling: A New Economic Paradigm
So let’s go then, you and I, to a new economic paradigm, starting with the Great Decoupling. This is when private industry rents AI agents instead of hiring knowledge workers. And when capital stops investing in labor, the value of human labor starts to erode along with the role of college, academia, the Federal Reserve, and a social contract. Current predictions are that by the end of 2030, it will cost less than $10,000 to replace one knowledge worker. So now our goal is to get our boss to like us.
So I used to be somewhat cynical about how sometimes it seems like for every problem technology solves, sometimes it makes you more, but that could be a source of a weird sense of hope. Because we’ll have jobs we can’t even think of in the future, because we’ll have problems we can’t even think of in the future. And so an example would be human sustainability. We used to extract land, now in a way we kind of extract human attention and emotions.
An oil rig extracts oil, a coal mine extracts coal, and social media does a lot of things, but one of the things it does is attract human attention and emotions. Data is the new oil, as they say. And since manufacturing left, we have nothing left to subject to technology except us.
And so we’ll have a whole new class of human sustainability jobs which cover how much to politically polarize the public to boost engagement and thereby company profits, and how much to intercede and extract between people with dating apps and all this stuff to prop up the economy. As well as maybe, if for some things, we should get a vote on the direction of technology.
But overall, since health is the amount of value you provide yourself, relationships is the amount of value you provide to people you know, and money is a stranger’s perception of how much value you provide, then so long as we have problems and strangers we can provide value to, then we’ll have jobs. But if we have too many problems, then we may enter a dystopia.
AI Alignment and the Case for Beauty
Now assuming that AI really won’t want to take over the human world in the same way that humans really don’t want to take over the ant world, you can try if you want, then we may, and also if AI, oh, if we don’t get world peace through some sort of technological world sedation, then if we do align AI with human values, then to prevent maybe an AI takeover or something like that, it may become a national emergency to bring beauty back into our creations.
Because we’ll kill everything but butterflies and ladybugs. And personally, I think we could do better than having Walmarts as our town squares.
Universal Basic Income and the Abundant Economy
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Actually, I’m going to keep going. Universal basic income will probably come technologically, Kurzweil says, around 2035, but politically we’ll see what happens. With universal high income, maybe as soon as 2045, which sounds good to me.
But my only slight worry would be if AI really does make us useless, then our excess energies may have nowhere else to go but back onto ourselves. And so we may choose to inflict pain on ourselves, because otherwise it might feel harder to feel human. But we may shift from a more restricted economy, like we have now, of allocation of scarce resources, to a more general economy of extravagant waste of abundant resources.
Now if AI really does start to take our jobs, then people may say, well, money can’t buy happiness. But if we’re all broke, we can’t buy anything. But if we do get universal high income, then by prioritizing inspiration and beauty, pointless extravagance can help save us from pointless pain.
Merging with Technology: Choice or Necessity?
Now some people say the only way to stay relevant in a future AI economy would be by merging with technology. Which could be, but my only worry would be forced merging. Which is when you have no choice but to merge, because society, potentially out of poor planning, becomes too inhospitable for humans to survive without merging.
Infinite Life: The Next Frontier
Next up we have infinite life. Infinite life will be possible, Kurzweil says, for the rich by around 2032, and democratized around 2040. And right now the advice from the rich is not to be poor and die in those eight years, but since women live longer than men, some of you guys might want to get a sugar mommy.
So let’s make this more concrete. So a hundred years ago in the 1920s, the average lifespan was in the 50s, now it’s in the 80s. So a hundred chronological years have passed, and we’ve gained 30 biological years. You can also look at somebody like Brian Johnson, who claims to have reduced his biological age by 10 years, and for every one chronological year that passes, he only biologically ages 0.7.
Now by the time we have people claiming that they’re going to live forever, we’ll also have AI agents claiming that they’re conscious. And they’ll have money, so we can’t ignore them.
Consciousness: Emergence vs. Ingression
So this will kind of break science, right, because it’s really difficult to measure consciousness, but that could be maybe because our current philosophy, the grounds and is underneath science, is maybe more restrictive than reality actually is. Because currently we say that from the atoms in our brain emerge the emergent properties of like intelligence or consciousness, but it could be that maybe consciousness already exists and you build a home for it to ingress into out of atoms or patterns or who knows what, right?
And so we may be in for a Copernican-style perspective shift where we realize, hmm, maybe consciousness doesn’t emerge, it ingresses. Or maybe only some things ingress. Or maybe there’s no line at all between emergence and ingression. Doesn’t exist. Hard to say. But I’ll be going over how to make a new academic discipline to help test this a little bit more rigorously to see what happens. But for now, since ingression is interesting and it’s useful, let’s just say it’s true for this talk.
The Singularity
This will help us better understand the singularity. The singularity is a term by Ray Kurzweil, which is when $1,000 buys a computer a million times more computationally powerful than the human brain. Now if the trend keeps going, this will happen around 2045. And for us, this will probably feel like whenever a fish first wondered if we could walk on land, except this time we’ll wonder, can we liberate our minds from the chrysalis of matter to not just house patterns, but become them?
And I’ll also say that our current language, spoken at least, only includes one sense, which is sound, mainly. But we may get a new language, a full language, that includes all of our senses, right, with brain-computer interfaces, so that you’ll be able to actually see what I mean as we speak things into being.
New Impressionism: Art for a New Language
And so to prepare for if we get that new language, we’ll need to do art movement to help explore that, get us comfortable with that. And so I’ll call it new impressionism. And so the idea here is to pick up where the impressionists left off, because the impressionists only pass the world’s image through their senses onto a painting to show their sensations. But we may extend this, so that instead of just image-sense-impression, it will be any medium through any medium, or any medium through any prism to any other medium. And the hope here is that multimodal impressionism will do for art what Newton’s prism did for science.
That’s pretty abstract, so let’s make this more concrete. How would you actually start doing this? So could we create a flower bed with flower spacing that is the same as a rhythm in a poem? Or could we create a box with the same side ratios as a chord’s sound frequency ratios? Or could we create like a seven-faced prism whose face ratios are the same as a rainbow’s wavelength ratios? And then maybe with that seven-faced prism, could we convert that back into a chord, right?
So what would it be like to kind of like rhyme on a chord to have like a box that kind of represents that, or like a seven-faced prism that represents that with the rainbows, you know? Might be some sort of divine object. Let’s pass some light through that, see what happens.
And to prepare for maybe if we not just listen to music, but maybe we live in music, could we create some sort of like music videos or silent music videos using everyday sounds, scenes, and surfaces, so that when we see them and stop, the timing of things in the world takes on a musical quality. Sort of like if you have a constellation, it’s actually made almost completely, if you look at it, by the lines between the stars rather than the stars themselves. So could we create some sort of art that like lets the silences like say something? An interesting idea.
But the idea here is we don’t have the full language yet, but if we can learn to rhyme with it, we’ll be much more prepared for when it arrives. And when it does arrive, then we’ll be able to make music you can taste, sail across musical fractals, create paintings you can walk inside of, and then wear your mind like clothes, like an octopus.
And so if we do liberate our minds from matter, then instead of just doing art like we’re doing now, we might be able to become art. And in art, people talk a lot about freedom of speech, right? But the thing with fashion, unless you’re sewing your own clothes, is that you’re only allowed to express yourself in the language allowed by companies. But if we have the breakdown of capitalism coupled with freeing mind from matter, then that will permit the universe to more freely and joyfully express itself to itself.
And once we do this, then we may realize that all divinely inspired music, dance, art, body painting, poetry, etc. was us wanting to speak the truth, but because of our limited language, only being able to rhyme with it.
Aliens, Intelligence, and the Universe Beyond Matter
And if we do free mind from matter, then we may first say, on the topic of aliens and alien intelligence, “I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us.” And then we may say, “This world is not conclusion. A species stands beyond, invisible as music, but positive as sound.”
And so we’ll realize that we only ever saw a very narrow range of light wavelengths, and we only ever heard a very narrow range of sound frequencies, and we only ever recognized a very narrow range of kinds of minds. And so we may extend our search for intelligent life beyond beings of matter and into beings of pattern.
And we may realize that our first contact with intelligent life isn’t sometime off in the future, but was actually in the past with math, because it was intelligent, because it had the capacity to solve problems. And it had some sort of consciousness, because it was a self-referential system. But it had no agency, because it had no instantiation.
What a Superintelligence Might Reveal
So if we do create, invent, or discover, you know, whatever, an agentic superintelligence, then I think what it will reveal could be much more interesting than what it creates, which could be that the universe organizes itself into fractal-like structures, sort of like how the shadow of a body is its shadow, or the shadow of a mind is the things it creates. Or if you look at a sand dune, it almost looks like a lower dimensional form of the wind, an impression.
And so if that is the case, that the universe organizes itself in that way, then maybe we shouldn’t fear death any more than we should fear walking underneath a bridge on a sunny day and then our shadow disappears. Or maybe we shouldn’t fear loss, because nothing in this world was ours to begin with.
And if the singularity does happen, which I kind of hope it doesn’t, because that’s like a lot of change, but if it does happen, then maybe we shouldn’t fear that any more than whenever the sun sets, and then all of our shadows fade to infinity.
Making This Falsifiable
Okay, guys, this has been pretty abstract. How can we make this scientific, right? How can we make this falsifiable? It’s not scientific unless it’s falsifiable. So here are some things to help falsify this.
The main one is the computation power. If the chart line deviates down from that exponential, then that falsifies a lot of this other stuff. You can still have the new art movement, you can still have the new philosophy rolling fine, but a lot of the other stuff, kind of, meh.
Next up, the great decoupling. If the number of useful AI agents in private industry decrease, that could help do that. If the longest lifespans decrease, that could also help.
If the introduction of brain-computer interfaces do not enable new forms of communication, then the new art movement, kind of, blah. And then finally, for consciousness, if the number of AIs claiming consciousness decrease, that could also help do it.
And to help further falsify the fifth, we could create a new academic discipline to help investigate ingression, see if it exists or not. So with that, this is where you create patterns out of many different substrates, many different things. So it could be anything you wanted, but it could be plant networks, cellular automata, software, algorithms, etc. Anything that gets you a nice pattern, kind of, base to work with.
And then you look at the patterns themselves, not the stuff it’s made out of, but the patterns themselves for evidence of behaviorist, evidence of learning, planning, or delayed gratification. And if you don’t find any patterned behavior, then it probably is just emergence rather than ingression.
Staying Open to Change
So I’m up for anything, if nothing changes, that’s fine, and if everything changes, that’s fine too. And just because somebody from the 80s who has a lot of PhDs said some things, doesn’t mean they’re true. It’s like that Abraham Lincoln quote, “don’t believe everything you read online.”
So overall, I’ve covered the great decoupling, infant life, and the singularity, and some personal speculation and starter ideas for a new art movement, a new philosophy, a new academic discipline, and maybe some new jobs, and maybe a new language.
But overall, I think the most important part is what you think, because it seems like everywhere we look, the old world is ending, and we need new ideas, new inspiration, and new creativity to create the new from the ashes of the old. Thank you.
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