Opinion: What the next decade holds for humans and AI

Andy Drennen

The year is 2036.

While you slept, your household artificial intelligence super-agent managed a day’s worth of decisions. It paid bills, coordinated family schedules, prepared talking points for a client meeting, ordered groceries – and even negotiated a lower rate with your internet provider. You learn all this when your home robot hands you a fresh cup of coffee, delivers your personalized morning briefing and stocks the refrigerator with groceries that just arrived via autonomous drone delivery.

Meanwhile, your household assistant gently wakes the kids and helps them prepare for school. But education looks very different from what it did just a decade earlier.

Every student now has a personalized AI tutor that understands exactly what they know, where they struggle and how they learn best. Lessons adjust in real time, moving faster when concepts are mastered and slowing down when additional guidance is needed. The traditional one-size-fits-all classroom has largely disappeared.

As a result, education has shifted away from memorizing facts and toward developing critical thinking, problem-solving, reasoning, verification and the ability to work effectively with AI systems. Students spend less time learning information – and more time learning how to evaluate it.

Social studies classes are now paired with required courses on communication, empathy and interpersonal skills, partly because gaming has become virtually indistinguishable from reality.

When knowledge became abundant and nearly free, the traditional value proposition of college changed. Universities could no longer justify four years of tuition simply by delivering information. Instead, they increasingly focused on research, mentorship, professional networks, hands-on experience and helping students apply AI to solve real-world problems related to their chosen fields.

Commuting has become easier and more productive. Autonomous vehicles handle much of the driving, allowing passengers to work, hold meetings or simply relax during the trip. As shared autonomous fleets reduced the need for parking, many lots were redeveloped into apartments, parks and charging stations.

At work, department leaders oversee teams of AI agents rather than employees. From sales and accounting to the factory floor, intelligent agents and robots coordinate operations, restock warehouses, prepare food and assist with healthcare services.

For families, companion robots are lifelike and a godsend to adult children helping older relatives. Dementia patients have “someone” who has infinite patience. They have someone to prepare meals, recognize signs of confusion and remind your uncle to take his nighttime meds.

Physicians have created your digital twin by combining your medical history and real-time health data to predict potential health issues using advanced AI modeling. This allows your health team to personalize a preventive treatment plan tailored to your unique biology using your virtual replica.

With people living longer, Social Security and Medicare have come under increasing pressure. The challenge is not only funding longer retirements and rising healthcare costs but also addressing a growing shortfall in payroll tax revenue. Advances in automation and AI-driven productivity have enabled fewer workers to produce more output, reducing the number of traditional wage earners whose payroll taxes have historically funded these programs.

The productivity revolution created enormous wealth, but not everyone participated equally. As AI and automation transformed the workforce, ownership of productive assets such as stocks, bonds, businesses and real estate increasingly separated those building wealth from those relying solely on wages.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But the technologies described above are currently in development.

Amazon recently announced that it is expanding drone delivery to 500 U.S. cities and has a target to make 1 million drone deliveries this year. Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, designed for industrial labor and household tasks, is expected to be available for commercial sale in late 2027.

China’s UBTech recently unveiled an ultra-realistic AI human-replica robot built for companionship. It can hold conversations and maintain eye contact. China’s government has also launched a national initiative to deploy humanoid robots in more than 100 real-world scenarios.

The greatest risk is not that we overestimate what AI will accomplish over the next 10 years. It’s that we underestimate how profoundly it could reshape our everyday lives and choose to ignore the transformation currently underway.

Andy Drennen is a certified financial planner and senior portfolio manager at Simmons Private Wealth in Springfield. He can be reached at andy.drennen@simmonsbank.com.