2026. We are standing in the eye of the storm, mistaking the calm for safety, while automation eats through professions faster than the unemployment tables can be printed.
Micron's stock rose seven hundred percent this year. Not a correction — a phase change. Semiconductors converting from an industry into a substrate.
Writers first. Translators. Then software developers. Designers next — not because AI designs well, but because the screen itself is disappearing. Voice in, agent out. The interface's final form is no interface.
At lunch, a friend just got off the plane from SFO described Meta's arrangement: engineers now paid to label AI's work, to judge its judgments, sawing the rung beneath their own feet. Once the machine learns to grade its own homework, the graders are let go.
Elsewhere in the same industry, people wear cameras to record ordinary movement and speech, feeding gestures and mouse-clicks into models built to replace the people wearing the cameras. Robotics companies file to go public. The body becomes training data for its own obsolescence.
News of this travels slowly. What happens on a Stanford campus takes six months to reach a supply chain in China, another six to reach a stock report, a year more to reach general awareness.
The lag isn't a flaw in the system. The lag is the system's advantage, and it belongs to whoever notices first.
Which leaves the question nobody wants to answer with numbers: what does a person do once the making of things requires no person?
I don't know where the income comes from — government, some mechanism not yet invented, an economist's problem. What seems clearer is the shape of the hours left over: unstructured, offline, spent with other people instead of screens.
Fun was never going to be automated. Not because it's sacred, but because it produces nothing that scales.
Which returns us, absurdly, to a table, two people, no product, no output — talking about the weather, exactly the way the French have for decades, before any of this started, and, it turns out, after.