A Few Predictions for Artificial Intelligence

You can feel AI slowly seeping into every corner of corporate life.

Look around your office on Monday morning: that colleague crafting the perfect email, the designer tweaking layouts with uncanny speed, the analyst churning out reports. Chances are they are using AI.

But it’s not through any top-down directive. It’s happening from the bottom-up, as workers across departments test it out. Maybe you’re the one using it as well.

It’s only been about a year now since AI arrived for regular workers but you can see it’s already having some real effects on white collar work:

1) Helping software developers write code

2) Helping human resources write emails and sort resumes

3) Used by the finance department

4) Used by the market department

5) Doctors are using AI in the hospital

This is exactly how technology starts and becomes widespread, slowly, and then, almost unnoticed, it becomes the new normal. This is what happened with the smartphone. Most people think the smartphone revolution happened overnight. It didn’t; it took over a decade to gain critical mass. AI is following a similar path, steady, quiet at first, then suddenly everywhere.

We see this same quiet rise in platforms like Netflix. It’s hard to remember a time without it, but now it’s in nearly every home and keeps growing. Netflix is not just another version of broadcast TV. Broadcast TV worried about ratings for individual shows. Netflix worries about subscribers stopping payment of their services. So broadcast shows are really good, because they have to be. And Netflix is focused on quantity so you get overwhelmed.

Netflix is about throwing abundance at you: “What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance. Which in turn means that any given show just doesn’t matter quite as much as it could in the era of broadcast TV. “

A Time of Uncertainty

No one knows what’s going to happen with AI. We know it is powerful and growing fast like other technologies that dominated our world.

The elephant in the room is that AI’s real goal is to cut about half of today’s white-collar jobs. Teachers, call centers, back-office roles, programmers, corporate lawyers, family doctors, tech support, sales reps, reporters, writers, designers, accountants, it’s all on the line. Like the 80% automation wave that hit blue-collar work, only faster, this one targets roles with specialized, narrow skills.

Some people think this is a good thing, like this OpenAI employee. Scary to think about what this means, right?

Most Americans think this way too. We’re all just sitting back waiting to see what happens.

Right now, everything’s unpredictable. What happens to our working world when AI becomes as normal as Netflix or the smartphone? Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, thinks we’ll reach a point where people forget how to write altogether.

There could be some truth to this. Technology influences our natural abilities. But who knows?

Personally, I think AI will accelerate some non-lindy trends but also wipe away some modern things that are annoying and painful. It’s going to be a mixed bag.

Five Predictions For The Future of AI

1) AI Boyfriends Will Be More Popular Than AI Girlfriends

This is not an intuitive assumption for folks.

It supposedly common wisdom that AI girlfriends are on the verge of becoming wildly popular with men. You see it everywhere, media outlets push it like it’s a done deal, pointing to male loneliness, frustrations with the dating market, or a supposed "inevitability" in the way men might turn to AI companionship. Even Hollywood can’t seem to let go of the idea, pumping out movies with the same portrayal: men attached to AI girlfriends, like Her, where a man falls deeply in love with his virtual companion.

It’s practically a trope of science fiction at this point

But I think the reverse is going to happen.

Women will turn to AI to create boyfriend-like relationships, and here’s why: once AI gets smart enough to truly “get you”, that is, to understand the intricacies of a woman’s mind and respond with empathy and attentiveness it’ll be something she finds herself enjoying, maybe even depending on. Women like engaging conversations, emotional connection, the feeling of being understood, and an AI that can mimic social adeptness will offer that in ways human relationships sometimes can’t.

We’re already seeing a divergence between women and men in education, with women becoming more selective. Many women don’t want to “date down” and want partners who are just as educated and intellectually compatible. An AI boyfriend can be exactly as smart, witty, or well-read as they want him to be, no compromise required. The added flexibility for an AI partner to align ideologically and emotionally? That’s huge.

Then there’s another truth: women feel that men, even in committed relationships, don’t listen enough. Men often shift their priorities, putting relationships below work or hobbies, which leaves women feeling sidelined. They crave a partner who doesn’t put the relationship on cruise control, and an AI companion can be designed to respond and “listen” endlessly, keeping that feeling of connection front and center.

On top of all that, women have a stronger connection to the written word, they read more books, they value well-expressed thoughts, and the gender gap in reading habits reflects this. An AI boyfriend who can engage in thoughtful conversation, respond to long texts, or even suggest books to read? It’s easy to see the appeal.

As these trends continue to unfold, AI relationships might reshape not just individual lives but the very expectations we have around partnership and connection. The future is AI boyfriends for women, tapping into a need for depth and understanding in a way we’re only beginning to grasp.

The future could get weird.

2) Schools Will Ditch Written Exams and Homework and Return to Oral Exams

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