By Cory Hymel, VP of Research and Innovation at Crowdbotics

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already reshaping our world at an unprecedented pace, and we're only just beginning. Pondering AI's future often involves swinging between utopian optimism and apocalyptic dread. But this revolution will likely mimic others before it: a more nuanced path to how transformative technologies have historically developed and matured. By understanding yesteryear's patterns and tech's current trajectories, we can better anticipate AI's path forward and prepare for what lies ahead.

For a Glimpse Into the Future, Look to the Past
Looking back at historical trends involving new technology, we'll continue to ride the wave of hype, growth and funding for the next 12 months. I don't believe we've peaked on the inflated expectation curve of Gartner's "hype cycle" due to the sheer amount of opportunities for which AI can be used. This doesn't negate the cycle itself; it only extends the duration.

Over the next year, we'll see a few key trends to maintain the hype and growth trajectory:

• Agentic workflows: The use of AI agents in orchestrated frameworks to achieve ever more complex tasks.

• Smaller, better models: As architectures and algorithms improve, we'll see shrinking models with the same or better performance as the monolithic models of today.

• Synthetic data (for better or worse): Historically, training models on synthetic data eventually resulted in model collapse after only a few cycles. However, that is improving, and in order to scale, synthetic data is needed.

More Significant Changes on the Horizon
As we move a year or two out, things will start to get a little more interesting. In two years, we'll begin to really embody, as Deloitte so cleverly coined, "The Age of With," where AI has already replaced low-complexity, repetitive jobs in the market. It has become standard tooling in most companies and we will begin to see it move beyond the workplace and into our personal lives, where people more overtly lean on it for things we haven't before.

Here are a few things I'm excited to see in 36 months:

• Actionable agents: Agentic workflows will become more responsible with the ability to make decisions and take action more broadly.

• Digital twins: Highly dependent on hardware but more high-impact, digitally modeling the real world 1:1 has endless possibilities.

• Large-scale job disruption: Towards the tail end of the next 36 months, there will be noticeable impacts to job displacement, with policy measures to mitigate.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Could Become a Reality
Looking even further ahead, if we continue to innovate and progress at the current rate, AGI will become a reality. Beyond that, AI will more practically be in a position where it's running large swaths of infrastructure, supply chain, finance, and other core services that make civilization tick. This is also highly dangerous, given the environmental impact of large-scale compute services. If we become overly dependent on AI for core services such as those mentioned above, a large-scale climate event that requires us to scale back energy production would be crippling.

More positively, AI's potential in health sciences and proving individual, specialized medicine is very hopeful. Combined with improvements to 3D printing, the ability to diagnose and tailor specific clinical care can become a reality.

It's hard to go on record supporting that "AI will solve cancer," but early research does show a remarkable ability to synthesize new drugs far better than humans. Coupled with digital-twin advancement, our ability to find and test new drugs will accelerate considerably, making serious diseases more likely to be cured.

A Terrifyingly Exciting Future Awaits
Over the next several years, AI's journey will undoubtedly bring both remarkable achievements and sobering challenges. While the potential for AGI and breakthrough medical advances offers hope for solving some of humanity's most pressing issues, we must remain mindful and diligent of the risks - from environmental impact to economic disruption.

The key to navigating this future lies in understanding and learning from past technological revolutions while ensuring we develop AI responsibly and sustainably. We're at a delicate moment in history--our decisions today will shape not just how AI evolves but how it integrates into the fabric of human civilization, both good and bad. Ultimately, the question isn't whether AI will transform our world, because we already know it will. It's how we choose to guide that transformation to benefit humanity while mitigating its risks.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cory Hymel is the Vice President of Innovation and Research at Crowdbotics.  Cory is a passionate engineer, researcher, and futurist. From AI research on self-driving vehicles in the early 2000’s to founding multiple startups, his diverse experience has shaped his unique perspective on the future.  He seeks to further advance the field of Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on AI augmentation in software development. He has held leadership roles at Prime Notion Technologies (Founder), Simble (Founder, acquired by Enventys Partners), and Gigster (acquired by Ionic Partners). Cory is regularly a guest speaker, pundit and panelist for technology events and programs worldwide.