The Factorial Future
For most of human history, the human species has been the dominant life form on the planet. What I mean by dominance is that our efficacy of refining matter around us into technology is many orders of magnitude higher than the next closest species on the planet. Through the use of our hands and minds, we have created buildings, cities, societies, and an entire civilization that represents our collective effort. People from all walks of life, from everywhere around the world, have developed better technology through the years, and it all culminates in the Modern Era we know today. This way of life, as we know it, is now coming to an end—but it's not entirely a bad thing.
We have been developing computer-based technology long enough now to have trends and patterns. One such pattern that you may have heard of or be familiar with is the concept of technology roughly doubling every year. TVs are a fantastic example: for every year, they either get double the resolution, half the price, double the features, or some combination thereof. An extremely important distinction for those not aware is that this represents exponential growth—imagine starting with one dollar and doubling it each day for a month. By day thirty, you'd have over a billion dollars. However, what's even more remarkable is that this rate of change—which many find overwhelming—may actually be slow compared to what's coming.
If you've been keeping up, already in 2025, we have seen one incredible advancement after another in AI systems, each one seemingly more transformative than the last. If you are also familiar with the traditional pattern of technology doubling every year, you will notice that something about AI seems... different. Your intuition is correct, because AI is the first of a new category of technology which does not grow and improve exponentially, but rather at one order higher: factorial growth. To understand factorial growth, imagine instead of doubling each day, you multiply by the day number itself—by day five, you're multiplying by five, by day ten, you're multiplying by ten, and by day thirty, the numbers are growing at a rate that shatters the mind.
I could write for quite a while on why this is the case, but for now you will have to trust me. The objective of this post is not to prove AI advances at a higher order than all the other technology you are familiar with, I am confident this is the case. Rather, the purpose of this post is to let you know and warn you: The way of life you are familiar with is being phased out. Not in 100 years. Not in 50. Not 25. Within the decade.
What sort of precise impacts it will have is a hot topic of debate amongst technologists, futurists, economists, and others. While many people agree that AI will replace jobs, the more crucial questions of how fast and to what extent are often overlooked—yet these factors can be quantified with precision. My personal prediction, based on analyzing current technological trajectories and historical patterns of technological displacement, is that 50% of all current jobs held by humans will be replaced or displaced by AI by the end of 2027. I came to this specific date by examining the convergence of several key factors: the rate of AI model improvement, the pace of adoption, and the threshold at which AI becomes more cost-effective than human labor. Even if I am wrong, the margin of error is not more than 2 years.
I also don't want this post to come off as fearmongering, or trying to encourage you to do anything different than whatever you have been doing; life goes on. In fact, I think as we push closer to the end of this decade, we will begin to see the incredibly positive benefits of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) too. ASI is currently in a phase similar to a baby synthetic virus in a petri dish—it exists in controlled environments, showing remarkable potential for growth and adaptation, but remains contained within research parameters. It has the potential to grow very rapidly, but its actual existence is known by only the few researchers who get to work with it every day.
When ASI transitions from this controlled environment to the real world, the same world that you and I have come to love, it will quickly adapt to us being a large part of that world, except we will no longer hold that aforementioned dominance over the world. This does not necessarily make us a slave class, but it does mean the way of life that your entire bloodline has ever known will be no more. This transformation, while profound, opens new doors for humanity—Humans will have more time to focus on more human things, whatever that means to you—spiritual journeys, philosophical journeys, creative journeys. These pursuits are core to our being and can never be stripped from us. So here's a goodbye to the way things were, and a "Hello, World" to that new world waiting for us on the other side of this singularity.