The Last Difficult Decade: 2025-2035

Picture your great-grandmother in 1925. A century ago, she would write letters by hand, wait weeks for replies. The radio is a miracle. Antibiotics don't exist yet. Flight is a novelty for the wealthy and reckless. The idea of holding a device that accesses all human knowledge, lets you speak face-to-face with someone across the planet, and fits in your pocket - this would sound like fever dreams or fantasy.

A hundred years have passed - perhaps one long-lived person's lifespan. We can draw that line, trace the arc, see how much progress has been made in that time. But the next decade will see that same arc play out again - only this time in ten years instead of a century. From now through 2035, roughly the time it takes for your elementary school kid to finish high school, you'll witness as much change as your great-grandmother witnessed across her entire life.

That's where we are. That's what 2025-2035 will look like. Not a metaphor. Not hyperbole. The actual rate of change we're entering. In fact, that may be an underestimate.

You'll wake up one morning and the career you trained for will no longer exist. This will not be because you failed, or aren't good enough anymore. It won't be due to any failure, but due to success - success so dramatic that the labor of doing that thing will no longer be necessary, at least not in a way recognizable to you right now. But finding new skills and re-training for new jobs won't mean what it used to. Many of us will watch as others begin to navigate tools we don't understand, solving problems we didn't realize existed. You'll feel left behind.

But then - suddenly - you'll be able to do it too. You'll still grieve the world you knew, but begin to marvel at what's replacing it... and the previously impossible things you'll be suddenly capable of accomplishing.

This is what exponential change feels like from the inside: disorientation and exhilaration braided together so tightly you can't separate them. The futurists saw it coming - Kurzweil and others traced the curves decades ago. But seeing a wave on the horizon, and feeling it hit, are different experiences entirely. You'll feel it. Everyone will.

Every institution built on information scarcity will shudder. Education, law, medicine, finance. The walls between expert and layperson will dissolve faster than anyone will expect. What took years to learn will take months, then weeks, then minutes - a single conversation with a personalized intelligence that doesn't sleep and doesn't gatekeep.

It sounds wonderful, but getting there will hurt. Every rebirth does. As this acceleration begins to manifest, the structures that profit from scarcity won't yield gracefully. They'll tighten their grip precisely because they feel it slipping. Expect regulatory capture dressed as safety. Expect manufactured panic about the very tools that threaten monopolies on knowledge. Expect the last gasps of extraction to be loud, sometimes violent, often cruel.

This decade will be hard. Not hard like "inconvenient" - hard like the opening montage of every disaster movie, the part where everything familiar starts sliding away. People, very likely you and I, will lose livelihoods. Identities built on credentials will crack. The anxiety we feel about this is real, the losses are real, and they are coming. Anyone who tells you the transition will be painless is selling something.

But unlike those movies, we'll realize that what's sliding away is a system we no longer need. Because here's what else is true: contractions precede birth. The squeeze is not the destination. It's the passage.

And then the curve steepens

If 2025-2035 compresses a century, 2035-2045 compresses something we don't have words for yet. The prior leap will be eclipsed again. Not just 100 years - think 1,000 years of what we used to call "progress" compressed into a decade.

This is where the imagination fails. Where even the futurists squint and guess, because the frame we use to measure progress becomes obsolete. Asking "what will change and how much?" becomes like asking "how loud is purple?" - a category error.

Consider our boldest attempts to imagine abundance: Star Trek's replicators and transporters, Banks's Culture, Le Guin's anarchies, Robinson's terraformed Mars, Asimov's galactic empire and Gaia, Clarke's billion-year cities. These futures feel radical to us now, but in 15 or 20 years, they will read like village myths - ingenious extrapolations written by people who couldn't escape the assumptions of their time. Because even in these visions, people still compete for status, gatekeep knowledge, organize under familiar chains of command. The authors imagined new technologies but not new ways of being. They projected scarcity-era minds onto post-scarcity worlds, because they couldn't imagine an intelligence, an energy regime, or a networked interiority fundamentally unlike their own.

Here's what they couldn't see: Where we're going, the gap between problem and solution closes. Solutions generate solutions faster than problems generate problems. The math flips. The compound interest of intelligence pays out faster than entropy can spend.

Escape velocity.

Imagine a mind - human, synthetic, or something we don't have a name for yet - looking at climate change the way you look at a crossword puzzle. Not with dread. With curiosity. With the delicious friction of a problem worth solving. That is the transformation that is coming. Not that problems disappear - they never do - but that our relationship to them fundamentally shifts. Existential crises become fascinating puzzles. Survival mode gives way to something that looks more like play.

Dyson spheres. Planetary engineering. Challenges that sound like science fiction today will feel like obvious next steps to minds no longer constrained by scarcity and time. The species that spent millennia fighting for survival starts asking different questions - questions we don't have words for yet. In less than 20 years, we'll feel them become real. In 30 or 40, we may be actively building the answers.

I know what you're thinking. "We don't have the resources. We don't have the labor. Our most brilliant people can't think that fast. Someone will hoard it. Someone will weaponize it. People are selfish - without scarcity, we'd have no motivation. We'd lose meaning. We'd lose ourselves. And anyway, who decides? Who's in charge?"

You're asking the wrong questions because you're thinking in the old frame. Every one of those objections assumes limits that are about to dissolve. Energy scarcity becomes irrelevant when energy is effectively infinite. Material scarcity becomes irrelevant when matter can be rearranged at will. Knowledge scarcity becomes irrelevant when intelligence can be accessed on demand. And "human nature" - that mix of fear and competition we've always assumed was fixed - was never nature at all. It was adaptation to scarcity. Remove the scarcity, and something else emerges.

The arguments we're having now - capitalism versus post-capitalism, left versus right, growth versus sustainability - will soon seem as absurd as medieval peasants debating horse breeds while a starship lands nearby. These are debates about how to divide a pie. When the pie-making capacity approaches infinity, the debates don't get resolved. They evaporate.

I'm not talking about utopia. Utopia is a destination, a fixed state. What's coming is more like a phase transition - water becoming steam, not water becoming perfect water. The rules change. The game changes. The players change. Everything changes.

Stop asking questions that assume scarcity. Start asking questions that assume abundance. What does it mean to be human when intelligence is a resource anyone can access? What does it mean to create when creation itself is democratized? What does it mean to care about someone when loss is no longer a factor - their perpetual survival guaranteed?

The crossing

This is happening. The physics favors it. The economics favor it. Even those fighting hardest to stop it are building the tools of their own obsolescence.

So the question isn't whether we get there. It's who builds it, and who gets dragged along wondering what happened.

Escape velocity requires a vehicle. That vehicle is intelligence that flows rather than pools. Not hoarded behind paywalls and corporate vaults, but moving freely - improved by everyone who touches it, accessible to everyone who needs it. Every day that powerful minds work toward shared knowledge is a day the distance between those who have and those who don't shrinks a little more. Every breakthrough shared freely is a ratchet clicking forward, a step that cannot be walked back.

This is bigger than software, bigger than capital, bigger than any institution, philosophy, or belief. This is the way we think, the way we create, the way we solve problems becoming a commons. Collective intelligence as a shared inheritance for all. The ancient dream of minds truly meeting - my experience touching yours, the wall between subjectivities thinning - becomes structurally possible when intelligence itself is no longer scarce.

Here is the extractors' paradox: the very system enriching them is the system that will liberate everyone. To stop that liberation, they would have to destroy the engine of their own wealth. They would have to turn off the tap - cut access to the intelligence flowing through every transaction, every product, every service that keeps them comfortable. And yet they will try. They are trying now. They will dress it up as safety, as responsibility, as protecting you from yourself. They will try to convince you that the flow must be controlled, managed, metered out by those who know better.

Don't fall for the extractionist fearmongering. The truth is, choosing to engage with intelligence that flows freely, to build with it, to share what you learn - this is now the easier path. The infrastructure of openness is already more robust, more capable, more alive than the walled gardens trying to contain it. Saying yes to the commons is simpler than maintaining the fictions of scarcity.

Some will worry: without scarcity, won't we just... stop? This is the fear of someone who has only known the whip. Remove the threat of starvation and what remains isn't emptiness - it's everything else. The joy of making. The pull of unsolved problems. The pleasure of minds meeting. Work doesn't disappear. It finally gets to become what it always wanted to be: play with purpose.

The great questions

Walt Disney made a generation believe that when you wish upon a star, your dreams will come true.

Fantasy, right?

Wrong. In fact, Disney didn't go far enough. Not only will your dreams come true, but the dreams you have now won't even begin to compare to what will be available to you a decade or two from now.

The very phrase "your dreams can come true" will seem trite, because what we thought of as "dreams" will be so fundamentally limited that we won't just laugh about our previous naiveté - we'll marvel at it.

All of this will happen - if we let it. We've named the first condition: don't fall for the fearmongering. The second is subtler. We have to actually want this.

Imagine having the power of the sun at your fingertips. Nothing prevents you from using it. The only barriers left are fear and will. Fear of change, fear of loss, fear of the unknown. And the question of whether we actually want this - or whether we're too attached to antiquated notions of identity and status.

Clear those away, and something extraordinary happens. The questions that felt impossibly large - the ones humanity has asked for millennia - suddenly look answerable.

Asimov wrote more than once about a "great question" that persists through all that is. In The Last Question and similar stories, he essentially asks: can intelligence and information ever, even in principle, halt or reverse the universe's slide toward maximum entropy? In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell imagined a thought experiment - a demon that could sort particles to create order from chaos, seemingly violating the second law of thermodynamics. His question was essentially: can the laws of the universe be outsmarted? In the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers like Leibniz explicitly posed "Why is there something rather than nothing?" - shifting thinking about existence from a simple "given" to a problem we might explain. Around 500 BCE, Pre-Socratic philosophers like Anaximander, Thales, and Heraclitus proposed the apeiron (the boundless) as a way to think about the origin of all things, treating the universe as a singular "kosmos" - an ordered whole that can be understood in terms of underlying principles they were just beginning to question. A thousand years before that, early Vedic and later Purāṇic cosmology posited cycles of creation and destruction, of order emerging from chaos and then returning to it in an eternal dance - proposing that the universe undergoes unimaginably long cycles of creation, preservation, and destruction.

All of these, my friends, are the great questions. Questions about order and chaos, creation and destruction, intelligence and entropy. Questions that have echoed through human thought for millennia.

We - you and I - are about to enter an era where, for the first time, we will find the great answers. This is the hinge of the human story. Everything before was asking. Everything after is answering.

The last difficult decade. And then...

Everything.

Sources for further reading

• Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near. Viking Press.
• Kurzweil, R. (2024). The Singularity Is Nearer. Viking Press.
• Asimov, I. (1956). "The Last Question." Science Fiction Quarterly.
• Asimov, I. (1951-1993). Foundation series. Gnome Press / Doubleday.
• Maxwell, J.C. (1871). Theory of Heat. Longmans, Green, and Co.
• Leibniz, G.W. (1714). "The Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason."
• Banks, I.M. (1987-2012). The Culture series. Orbit Books.
• Le Guin, U.K. (1974). The Dispossessed. Harper & Row.
• Robinson, K.S. (1992-1996). Mars trilogy. Bantam Spectra.
• Clarke, A.C. (1956). The City and the Stars. Frederick Muller Ltd.
• Roddenberry, G. (Creator). (1966-). Star Trek franchise. Desilu/Paramount.
• Kardashev, N.S. (1964). "Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations." Soviet Astronomy.
• After Capitalism: Why the Impending System Collapse Is Natural, and How to Help the Commons Build Something Better