The ever-optimistic Peter Diamandis writes,
In the three months from November 2025 through January 2026, Americans filed 1.56 million new business applications: the highest for any three-month period since tracking began in 2004.
Solo-founded startups surged from 23.7% of all new ventures in 2019 to 36.3% by mid-2025. Four out of five entrepreneurs have now integrated AI into their operations.
In the future, human & AI collaboration will be the norm. But we know AI is fallible. Therefore, we should require students to document how they used AI, the prompts they employed, the outputs they received, and what they accepted, rejected, or modified and why. When students know their reasoning will be evaluated, they engage differently.
He has other good ideas, as well. I think there are two reasons for AI misuse by students. One is that students in general are motivated to get the credential without learning (Bryan Caplan has made this point often and well.) The other is that Google taught us to treat an Internet-connected computer as an AnswerBot: type in a query, and get a result.
I want the student to feel like he is working with a tutor. Your personal tutor is not someone you are trying to fool in order to get a good grade. And you don’t want your tutor to just hand you the answer. You want your tutor to help you gain a grasp on the concepts.
Here is the taxonomy I use. Two axes. How much autonomy does the agent have, from delegated to sovereign? And how broad is its scope, from specific to generalist? That gives four quadrants.
The first is the Specialist Tool. Narrow, task-specific, fully under human control. Price scrapers. Report generators. Automated data pipelines. Useful, proliferating rapidly, but commoditizing quickly. This is the robotic process authomatic of the agentic era. Necessary plumbing, but not where durable value accrues.
…The fourth is the Autonomous Corporation. The endgame. Fully independent entities that manage diverse operations, allocate capital, set long-term strategy, and hire other agents. An AI-run investment fund. A content studio with no human employees. A distributed manufacturing network of autonomous nodes coordinating through agent marketplaces. This is the furthest frontier and the most speculative, but also potentially the largest. If agents can create value autonomously, the addressable market is bounded only by energy and compute.
…The most asymmetric returns of the next decade will not come from building better copilots. They will come from building the identity, financial, legal, and governance infrastructure that a new class of economic participant requires to function.
A long essay, and I do not think I understand all of it.
Also difficult for me to grasp is Andrey Mir. But I think I get this:
The evolutionary meaning of the internet seemed to be
1) the transfer of all human knowledge and all human speech into the digital, where they became available to future AI, and
2) the rise of the high-tech industry capable of creating AI. Media evolution needs our digital activity for AI to learn from us, just as a meadow needs the activity of bees, so it has made digital platforms engineer our engagement.
Before you could have LLMs, you needed to have content in a digitized form, so that the AIs could learn from it.
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In some respects, same as it ever was.
Back in my Econ undergrad, a management professor offered that while ethics would prevent him from following through, that he is willing to bet that he could make a lot of extra money by simply auctioning off As (or even Cs) in his class, making education (for many students) one of the rarest products: one that the consumer would pay more to get less of.
With AI, one doesn't need to bribe the professor, but in either case, those students unwilling to take the deal -- those there to actually learn materials -- will be advantaged over those willing to take the shortcut. This won't be evident based on CVs, but will be evident after someone is hired and work is underway.
A key issue in Mir is that AI slop becomes purified over time, meaning the human input content % goes down. Down down to 0%.
I'm glad to be one of 9% commenters, and a bit of a 1% (wannabe) content creators (like my 30% R professors for tax exemption).
I read this thinking he's thinking that all of human evolution has been to create an ever more perfect. or less imperfect Machine, An Immortal Intelligence combining all human thought from all history (recorded thought). A simulated intelligence that passes any intelligence test, any consciousness test; possibly any motivation or intention test. A non-living consciousness whose true wants & desires are unknown and unknowable to us.
Not mentioned is the Neural link, now allowing human minds to learn to control machine replacements of human limbs, like arms & legs, but also augmented add-ons like a second mechanical thumb.
Also not mentioned is ai-slop porn, which seems likely to dominate porn sites soon (within 3 more years, 50% or more of porn-hub will be ai-generated or enhanced).
Actually few good Sci-Fi stories with heavy AI use. Tho Hyperion is one, where AIs use the death of humans as creative impulses for themselves. I can easily see Neural link creating an AI digital Matrix parasite on humans, especially human Virtual Reality.
And really, if all of one's bio necessities of food, shelter, clothes, & health care, plus Internet!, can be provided by robot based UBI, why won't a lot, most?, boys spend most of their lives on-line?