As I stood on a platform high above Wallace Wade stadium at Duke University, watching the graduating class below me, I was staring at the clouds and moon. I was fortunate enough to be upright with much room around me, unconfined to one of the tens of thousands of tiny chairs in the stadium beneath, and I could stretch and gaze around without seeming rude. As I looked at the moon in the pale blue morning sky, the President of the school uttered over the loudspeaker, “Congratulations to the class of 2026.”
It occurred to me at that moment how shocked the people of 1968 would be to visit the year 2026. The reason I mention this year is because 1968 is when 2001 was released, and it portrayed a time of:
- a sprawling, well-established moon colony;
- massive and regularly-scheduled passenger spaceships;
- enormous space stations generating their own gravity and replicating the human experience on Earth so well that there is literally a Hilton hotel on one of them.
And yet now, in 2026, a full quarter-century after the setting of the movie, what do we have?
Well, we’ve certainly made technological advances, such as the ability to create exceptionally realistic digital pornography in the comfort of our home office, as well as the means to waste countless billions of hours looking at thirty-second videos.
I daresay visitors from the late 1960s would be supremely disappointed.
I mention this only to say that the exciting vision of 2001 was based on extrapolation. Whenever something revolutionary comes along, people have a tendency to extend its anticipated uses and popularity to absurd degrees.
The Wright Brothers managed to fly a heavier-than-air contraption for a few moments at Kitty Hawk? Soon everyone will have their own planes to get to work.
Nuclear power comes along in the mid-20th century? Soon everyone will have their own miniature nuclear power plants in their homes to provide them energy.
The human genome is unlocked? Soon everyone will be ordering up blonde-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot tall hyperintelligent offspring.
And so it goes.
The latest “won’t it be great when ____________________” is, of course, AI, which is why every semiconductor maker, every memory chip maker, every multi-trillion dollar tech company, and every hyperscaler is bathing in a shower of cash right now and lurching to lifetime highs every single day, all because AI is going to – – – well — – somehow or another – -make everything way better.
This may be the biggest bubble based on hope ever imagined, and if and when the whole damn thing explodes – – and for the sake of humanity and collective sanity, I sure hope it does – – we are indeed going to live in a world no one imagined before.
Just not the one that’s being promised.
