Agents of Change: The Imminent AI Future
By Ed Rutkowski
June 15, 2026—Do you check your phone before you get out of bed each morning? Maybe you’ve become so accustomed to the endless scroll that your phone is the last thing you see before you fall asleep and the first thing you reach for when you wake.
If you’re old enough, consider your life before cell phones. Did you ever think you’d become so reliant on a device that you would literally take it to bed with you?
For the author and futurist Tom Koulopoulos, these behavioral changes brought about by technology are as interesting, and as potentially significant, as the technologies themselves. In his closing keynote at AIHA Connect in New Orleans on June 3, Koulopoulos mused on the upheavals unleashed by AI and the accompanying behavioral changes that, he believes, will inevitably follow. Within 10 years, he predicted, we will all be as enthralled by our own personal AIs as we are by our phones.
“This is perhaps the greatest social experiment that’s ever been conducted,” Koulopoulos said. “The next six years will see more change, more disruption, more technological shift, and more behavioral shift than the last 60.”
Predicting the technologies that will rule our lives may be easier than imagining the ways we’ll accommodate them. In 1993, AT&T released a prescient series of television advertisements that depicted a world where people read books on computer screens, navigated according to digital maps, scribbled electronic notes on tablet-like devices, paid tolls without stopping their vehicles, purchased concert tickets from computers, streamed movies on their televisions, attended virtual classes, and delivered virtual presentations. While these ads played onscreen behind him, Koulopoulos marveled at how much AT&T knew about the future, and its failure to introduce any of the imagined products.
The company got a lot of the details right. What it missed, Koulopoulos said, was the pace of technological change and how quickly we would adapt to it.
“The winners of the future are the ones who appreciate that you can’t wait until you’re ready to enter it,” he said. “Because, by definition, you won’t be.”
Behavioral changes will be essential to manage the exponential increase in data that AI will generate, Koulopoulos suggested. His presentation included a graph depicting the rate of data growth, according to which, around the year 2200, the total bits of stored data will equal the number of atoms that comprise Earth. “You do get to a point with data where it’s overwhelming,” Koulopoulos deadpanned. “We’ve built so much complexity in this world that we cannot navigate that complexity any longer."
By 2050, data centers alone will consume as much energy as the rest of the world, Koulopoulos said, a clearly unsustainable situation. One potential solution, which may happen sooner than we think, is to put data centers in space, where they’ll run on solar power.
If Koulopoulos has any doubts about our technology-assisted ability to overcome the challenges of technological dependence, he didn’t mention them. He envisions a transformation that will happen in a relative eyeblink: today’s “agentic” AI, which can make decisions autonomously in pursuit of defined goals, will, in as little as five years, give way to “recursive” AI—a through-the-looking-glass state in which AI, on its own, builds more AI.
As AI’s abilities expand, so will its role, from menial work to much more complex tasks. Koulopoulos believes we’ll figure out how to manage the resulting displacement of workers. We’re good at creating new forms of value, he said; after all, a person living in the 1800s, when the majority of jobs were on farms, could scarcely have imagined today’s world, which by Koulopoulos’ estimate includes two billion knowledge workers. His one note of caution is the stuff of dystopian science fiction: that the shift to recursive AI might happen before we’re able to instill it with morality. Hopefully we’ll figure that out, too.
The world we’re building, Koulopoulos said, is one that makes AI not only possible but necessary, where professionals in every industry need to analyze more data to make more decisions in less time. In such a world, AI will be an essential collaborator.
To illustrate what that collaboration might feel like, Koulopoulos portrayed onscreen a realistic digital avatar of himself and engaged in conversation with it. The avatar’s “knowledge” came from an AI that Koulopoulos had created with off-the-shelf tools and trained on his own books. During the exchange, the avatar answered its creator’s questions in the same resonant voice and was gracious when the real Koulopoulos interrupted it. Then two more avatars appeared, Koulopoulos facsimiles right down to his eyeglasses and salt-and-pepper beard. For a dizzying few minutes, the digital Koulopouli interacted with the analog one. Talk about through the looking glass.
If the audience was bewildered, fascinated, or both, well, that was the point. We aren’t ready for what’s coming, but it’s coming all the same, and it’ll be here before we know it. Koulopoulos urged attendees not to wait until they’re comfortable before engaging with AI and grappling with its attendant challenges.
“AI is not going to make you less relevant,” he assured us. “Used well, used wisely, it will amplify the humanity that you bring to the world.”
Ed Rutkowski is editor in chief of The Synergist.