When you imagine yourself in 2030 ... what do you see?

Sarah dzida

Sarah dzida

— 3 min read
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What do my next few years look like? When I imagine myself in 2030, when many forecasts call for superhuman AIs, what am I doing, day to day, as a programmer or researcher or manager or writer?
—Gwern, Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security

Back in August 2025, when Jon and I first started collaborating together, we looked into our crystal ball and made two predictions about the future. Actually, we didn't predict, we started actively working on them because we knew that it was only a matter of time. And lo' they are here!

Creativity & Imagination are Everything

If the 🤖🤖🤖🤖s are going to do everything and flatten the value of expertise, mastery, knowledge, labor, and more, then the only ONLY thing that you the mere human have of value is what is happening inside your head right now. What might only you create? What might only you imagine? What might only you envision as a potential future? What might you the human only come up with and understand in the dark recesses of your brain and life?

And the tech titans are already there!

  • Hilary Gridley, Anthropic's newest hire as lead of AI Fluency just wrote on LinkedIn: "When AI takes on more of the execution, knowledge workers function more like art directors. They curate the references that shape the work, and determine whether the resulting work meets their standard. Fortunately, there is a type of institution that excels at training exactly that: art school." So that's one area I've been digging into: how do you teach people clarity about what they want, and what they like? How do you help leaders develop a vision for the future that inspires, and then make that vision a reality?"
  • In a post from the popular Lenny's Newsletter in which tech product leaders read to get the scoop on what's happening in the big tech giants, Josh Woodward of Google Labs said: "The best ideas almost never come from a design sprint or brainstorm. At Google Labs, the ideas that became NotebookLM, Google Flow, Google Beam, and AI Studio all started with small groups of people who were obsessed with an insight and couldn’t stop themselves from building. These ideas surfaced in the shower, over a weekend, in a hallway. The implication for teams everywhere is that the environment matters more than the process. “You cannot microwave a good idea.”
  • Even Sam Altman agrees as a friend shared with me via this Instagram post that people need to become "high agency" meaning the human needs to know why they are motivated to do something, love the highs and lows of doing it, test its boundaries, and focus on what they can uniquely contribute in spite of uncertainty.

What is your organic OS (Operating System)?

They're here already. Jon seems to send me a new one every week: Dots, Omarchy, tldraw, LifeOS, and more! You're going to see OS be used in a lot of GTM marketing because if the 🤖🤖🤖🤖s can do anything, then you the human are no longer indentured in the SaaS systems of the last decade. You can customize your tools for yourself exactly as you want them!

But the problem with all these solutions is that they still perpetuate enshittification. Coined by Cory Doctorow, enshittification is how platforms rot: they start out good for users, then squeeze users for businesses, then squeeze everyone for profit. Doctorow says it’s not inevitable, just what happens when weak antitrust and anti-competition laws let companies trap people.

AI will be no different.

Ok it's true, now what?

  • If your individual creativity is key to mapping out a path to a future you want to live in ...
  • And technology that you can shape and control to your own natural OS aka creative process and flow is the key
  • Then we once again put the power of tools and in the hands of individuals!
  • And perhaps more importantly, instead of so many builders working to make one visionary's creative dream real, we have more creative types actively shaping the world with all the things that make creativity and imagination a powerful force in this world.

THE END! See you next week.

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