At the turn of this year, Elon Musk posted on X that we have entered the Singularity. Sam Altman got there first, writing in his June 2025 essay The Gentle Singularity that we are past the event horizon. Even Demis Hassabis, usually the most measured of the three, said we are standing in its foothills.
AI company CEOs have a vested interest in selling this idea, so some scepticism is fair. But they are describing an upside: a potential utopia. So rather than asking whether the takeoff has started, this week we ask what life actually looks like on the other side.
In our latest video we fast forward to 2040 and walk through a single ordinary day. The date sits comfortably inside expert predictions. Ray Kurzweil forecast AGI by 2029 and the Singularity by 2045, and held both dates in his 2024 book The Singularity Is Nearer. 2040 falls between them.
Others bracket the same window. In October 2024, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay called Machines of Loving Grace, describing powerful AI as a country of geniuses in a datacenter, possibly arriving within a few years. Hassabis puts full AGI at a 50% chance by the end of this decade.
A decade sounds short for a civilisational transformation. Britain's Industrial Revolution took seventy years to make the world of 1780 unrecognisable by 1850. The claim from Kurzweil and Amodei is that AI compresses those seventy years into something closer to ten.
A morning without the dread
In this 2040, the day begins without an alarm. The first difference from 2026 is the absence of a low-grade dread, the feeling of a day already owing things to other people before it starts. Most of that feeling was economic anxiety in disguise, and the economics have changed.
A band on the wrist reports on blood chemistry it read overnight, cross-referencing every medical paper ever published against your genome and history. Most mornings it has nothing to report, which is the point. A cancer that would have killed you at sixty gets caught early and cleared by a bespoke drug designed in weeks.
Amodei predicted that AI-accelerated biology could double the human lifespan, on the grounds that life expectancy already roughly doubled across the twentieth century. In this version of 2040, that process is underway.
Work has thinned rather than vanished. Overnight, agents watch everything published, flag three stories worth covering, research them to primary sources, draft scripts and test forty thumbnails. What took a week in 2026 is a menu waiting with the coffee. The remaining job is to say yes, and to notice the idea the agents missed.
An avatar presents most of the output, because it can record in forty languages simultaneously and never fluffs a line. Viewers know it isn't the real presenter, and mostly they don't mind, in the same way nobody minded that authors don't typeset their own books.
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When nothing you do is needed
The afternoon meeting takes eleven minutes. Half the faces on the call are agents attending on behalf of their humans, and they settled most of it beforehand. What remains is the part machines hand back: whether the thing should be done at all, and who takes the blame if it goes wrong.
The pay is closer to a gesture than a wage. A universal basic income covers the living, and food and energy cost so little that it barely has to stretch. Cheap energy is the floor the whole post-scarcity argument stands on, and in this version of events, it holds.
The philosopher Nick Bostrom saw the catch coming. In his 2024 book Deep Utopia, he split the problem in two. Shallow redundancy, losing your job to a machine, is the easy part. Deep redundancy reaches past your job to every reason you ever had to make an effort, because the machine has it all covered.
The upside is real too. An AI tutor that knows exactly how a child learns, speaks every language and costs nothing was a privilege of the wealthy in 2026. By 2040, a teenager in rural Kenya has the same guidance as a student at Harvard. Of everything in this imagined day, that is the easiest part to defend.
In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted his grandchildren would face the problem of how to use their freedom from pressing economic cares. In this 2040, he is being proved right. The abundance gets delivered. The structure and meaning that work once provided have to be rebuilt by hand, and not everyone manages it.
The version that never happens
Everything above depends on choices that have not been made, and the biggest is who owns the abundance. The technology is being built by a handful of companies funded by extraordinary concentrations of capital. Nothing about cheap energy and capable agents guarantees the gains are shared.
The universal basic income that makes the free afternoon possible is a political decision, not a technical one. The gains could pool at the top, and the same tools that deliver the free afternoon could spend it watching you.
One ninety-nine-word poem has carried three visions of this future. Richard Brautigan's 1967 All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace imagined a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers lived in harmony. In 2011, filmmaker Adam Curtis borrowed the title to argue that Silicon Valley utopianism reliably produces new forms of control.
Amodei took the same title in 2024 to argue that this time the technology really could deliver. Gary Marcus, meanwhile, responded to Musk's post by noting that CEOs declaring the Singularity does not make it true, and that the last decade is littered with their missed predictions.
Every element of the good day is a live research programme in 2026: the diagnostics, the agents, the tutors, the avatars. Every element of the bad version is live too: the ownership, the surveillance, the timeline hype. If the takeoff really has started, the next fourteen years decide which version of the poem we get.
