“Did you see today's report? Looks like the dashboard is sick again. Database queries have been timing out for about 20% of users.”
“I know. I ran a bunch of introspection tests, but they all came back negative. I've already scheduled a prompt vaccine for the next generation. It should be fully adult and ready to deploy by tomorrow.”
–Two Software Geneticists at work
The Year is 2036
After a brief rise following the Taiwan “incident”, compute costs have steadily declined for the better part of a decade, and AI has become omnipresent in every facet of daily life.
The age of operating systems, websites, and apps as we knew them is over. They've all been replaced by Platforms, and they all pretty much do the same thing–which is everything. At this point, whether you adopt iLife, Metasphere, or OpenCodex is mostly a matter of preference.
When a User and a Codebase Love Each Other Very Much…
These meta-apps are no longer written, but generated on the fly by mating a mother prompt with a user's specific data profile, resulting in a unique, ad hoc piece of living software.
Because code is no longer deterministic, bugs cannot be fixed manually. Instead, codebases self-heal over time when they detect issues. Or, for more serious issues, prompt vaccines can be added to the mother prompt to ensure the next generation is hopefully free of the defect.
The Platform Knows All
When you first wake up in the morning, your Platform presents you with a personalized feed or content tailored to keep your attention for a set amount of time, based on your declared and revealed preferences.
As your personal content butler, the Platform ingests media from various sources (some real and some artificial, though the distinction is increasingly meaningless) and seamlessly swaps out any products or brands mentioned within according to dynamic token auctions.
Since the Platform also monitors your health and mood, it will also insert nudges towards specific food groups or activities. Because your personal model has deemed a magnesium deficiency to be quite likely, the influencer you're watching is dressed in yellow, and an Amazon coupon for half-off banana delivery will be injected in the feed.
These “wellness nudges” have pushed humanity's life expectancy to its limits (a phenomenon known as “lifemaxxing”), with the first 150-year old expected to have already been born. Each year, the Bryan Johnson Award (named after the late longevity pioneer who tragically died of a rare form of trans-fat deficiency) is given to the person who scores the highest on their combined biomarkers.
If a Tree Burns in the Forest…
As a side benefit, these major advancements in global health have also helped assuage global warming worries. While energy demands are at an all-time high and abnormal weather events have become the norm, the newfound mental stability provided by Platforms guarantees users do not suffer any resulting stress-related externalities.
Death Comes For Us All
Sadly, while humanity (well, part of it at least) now lives in a nirvana-like state of permanent AI-induced bliss, every silver lining must have its cloud.
Because of constant self-patching, living codebases often suffer from a variety of issues, from overall slowness due to sheer size, to runaway growth that can often interfere with–and sometimes even kill–other processes.
As a result, Platforms have to periodically self-reboot after a few years of use, which can be quite a traumatic experience for their user due to the loss of accumulated context. An industry of specialized counseling has sprung up to help address this trauma, and guide users through the painful yet hope-filled transition to a new Platform generation.
A Bright Future Awaits
AI Platforms have also drastically simplified child-rearing, for the rare few still interested in raising a real-world child. Each child grows up alongside their own personalized Platform, ensuring they follow their own optimal neural development pathway. As a result, toddlers now routinely master two or even three languages by their second birthday and show no signs of social immaturity, even with reduced parental interactions.
So from where we stand here in 2036, life really is perfect, and it's hard to imagine that as recently as ten years ago, some people still identified as “AI skeptics”, or even “AI doomers”.
The future is here, and it's easier, brighter, and hotter than ever!
If you enjoyed reading this, you might want to check out the just-released State of Web Dev 2026 survey results, covering how 7,000+ web developers use AI today; and what they think about AI's biggest risks.
Header image generated with ChatGPT–but then again, you already knew that didn't you?
Top comments (0)