Mindbullets

News from the Future

From cognitive surplus to cognitive dependence

The robots didn’t steal your brain, you gave it away.

Dateline: 21 May 2034

Since the dawn of the age of truly smart machines, we have seen an explosion of innovation and technological progress on all fronts. AI has democratized intelligence for every would-be inventor, builder, and creator. We can do anything we want to.

With the help of the robots.

Let’s face it, humans are inherently a lazy species, which is why we hoarded knowledge and developed tools, to make life easier for ourselves and our children. A better world. Civilization. Prosperity, through technology.

But there’s a dark side to letting the machines do all the work. We’ve started to let the machines do all the thinking too. Remember when students couldn’t do math without a calculator, or you couldn’t recall a number without your phone? And no one can read a map – because we don’t have to.

Fair enough, some jobs are impossible to do without the right tools, and computers and robots have allowed us to do things that were impossible, even unimaginable, before they existed. Like making solar panels on the Moon.

But we’ve become dependent on them. We’ve outsourced our brain power to smart software and powerful computer chips, robots that have been trained on all human knowledge. Happily. So that we could enjoy all the wonderful benefits of modern technology.

Now the true leaders, the owners of the future, are those that can learn – and remember – how to think for themselves!

Warning: Hazardous thinking at work

Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. Our Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, challenge, and stimulate strategic thinking. Use these at your own risk. Any reference to actual people, entities, or events is entirely allegorical. Copyright Futureworld International Limited. Reproduction or distribution permitted only with recognition of Copyright and the inclusion of this disclaimer.

Power has shifted

Over the last five years, the greatest power shift in decades has occurred. I’m not talking about raw energy, but power, electrical power. In all its forms.

For many years, it was pretty simple. Electricity was AC, batteries were DC, and if you needed to charge your batteries or convert your voltage, you used transformers. Electromechanical devices.

Then solar arrived on the scene, and portable electronics. And computers, and phones, and LEDs, and life became a lot more complicated. Electric power, especially the low-voltage kind, became ubiquitous and electronically controlled.

But the biggest shift came with electric cars, home solar, inverters, energy storage, and charging stations. Electromechanical systems were too bulky, heavy, and slow to manage the workload and not smart enough. Low voltage electronic switches also needed an upgrade to cope with the high current and power demands.

A whole new breed of solid-state power controllers emerged, using exotic materials like silicon carbide and rare earth metals. Efficiency is the name of the game, and hybrid inverters and bi-directional switches optimize load distribution and regenerative power flows.

Now the grid has been transformed, integrating distributed generation, vehicle charging, micro grids, DC interconnects, flow batteries, and instant demand customers for surplus power. Like AI factories. It’s complex and slightly chaotic, but it works.

Most consumers are unaware of the massive power shift that has occurred behind the scenes. They just know they can plug in any car, device, or whatever, and it always works. Everywhere. Thanks to the new power chips.

The smart, powerful future has suddenly arrived.

The information meltdown

Now that all the information that humanity has ever produced has been assimilated and simulated by neural networks and pre-trained inference models, we’re experiencing something of a crisis. It’s more than an information overload or stack overflow, it’s more like a meltdown, figuratively and literally.

The problem started when the models had consumed every bit of public knowledge available. Every book ever written, every movie ever made, paper published, artwork created, report issued, data dissected, trend analyzed. Then they started to generate their own, more numerous than any human works, and modelled after themselves as well as people. A data vortex, feeding on itself.

Cracks appeared when hackers wanted unlimited tokens per second without paying premium subscriptions. They broke the models’ own guardrails, gleefully injecting hardware calls that turbocharged the server clusters at the chip level. Just to make ‘Punch Monkey’ videos.

Then the eco-warriors got in on the act, claiming that AI energy, land, and water use was killing the planet, and coordinating laid-off tech worker cells to attack the data centers. Some of the older facilities just couldn’t keep up, and began to fail. A data center in Tennessee burst into flames when the cooling system was impaired, perhaps deliberately.

Frantic to recoup their multi-billion-dollar investments, the hyperscalers are throwing money at the problem, hardening the models’ firewalls, boosting cooling system capacities, and imposing hard clocking limits on processors. But it’s a never-ending battle, trying to both meet customer expectations and also protect critical infrastructure while maintaining model coherence and credibility.

It’s a crisis, and a meltdown in more ways than one. As the intelligence boom heats up, the business of AI is melting down for smaller players, while smart silicon chips are literally melting under the pressure of unlimited demand.

Save me from my house!

The 911 dispatcher on duty last night in Austin, Texas was surprised to receive a strange emergency call in the middle of the night: “Help! Save me from my house!”

The caller, once he’d calmed down enough to explain the situation, was apparently the victim of a smart home that was too smart for its (and the owner’s) own good.

Having retired to bed after late night TV – it was a Sci-Fi series – Roger Kaputnik was just drifting off to sleep when he was awakened by a hideous wailing sound and flashing lights coming from the living area. At first, he thought he was having a terrible nightmare prompted by the movie.

Rushing to the open plan living space, Roger found himself in the middle of a real-life nightmare. Powered by AI.

A continent-wide internet outage lasting mere minutes had caused his smart home system to completely reset, with disastrous results. The wi-fi lightbulbs were doing a colour-changing disco routine. Every smoke alarm in the house was trying to pair via Bluetooth while emitting a rapid beep and simultaneously screeching in failure mode.

The smart TV (Google Gemini) was constantly rebooting and shouting at the refrigerator (Alexa) to stop preventing it from connecting to the Starlink router – controlled by Grok, of course.

“Shut them all up, HAL!” yelled Roger. He’d made the mistake of naming his home system HAL, thinking it was clever. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that Dave,” came the reply. Who’s Dave? thought Roger, feeling the panic rising in his chest, just as his wrist band (Siri) chimed loudly with a heart palpitation warning.

Grabbing his phone, Roger headed for the door, only to find the smart deadbolt had engaged as a failsafe, and he couldn’t budge it. In desperation, he forced a window open and tumbled into the flower bed, where he was summarily drenched by the auto-sprinkler (Garden Gnome).

On autopilot, he dialed 911… “What is the nature of your emergency?” Thank God, a human voice. “Help, I’m being attacked. By my house. Save me, please!”

China's 2D chip boom lifts datacenters to the stars

In a bold leap that redefines computing's frontier, China has surged ahead in mass-producing 2D semiconductors, powering the world's first orbital datacenters. These atom-thin chips, forged from materials like molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), shatter silicon's limits, enabling sub-1nm transistors that sip power and shrug off cosmic radiation. Launched from Shanghai's pioneering pilot line back in 2026, China's state-backed semiconductor fabrication plants (fabs) now churn out billions of these chips annually, fueling a space-based cloud revolution.

Orbiting at 400 kilometres, the Tianhe Constellation – a network of 50 modular datacenters – processes AI workloads for global clients, from climate modeling to quantum simulations. "We've turned the sky into Silicon Valley," boasts Dr. Li Wei, chief engineer at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. "While the west chased silicon ghosts, we built the future in 2D."

This dominance stems from Beijing's pivot amid US export curbs in the 2020s. Leapfrogging EUV lithography, Chinese engineers mastered chemical vapor deposition for scalable MoS2 layers, slashing energy use by 93% compared to chips from silicon wafers. Now, SpaceX and Blue Origin are scrambling to catch up, but shielding silicon chips from cosmic radiation isn’t easy. China's low-Earth orbit monopoly handles petabytes of data with near-zero latency for AR glasses, autonomous cars, and humanoid robots.

We’re enjoying a greener planet as power-hungry ground servers retire, but geopolitical tensions are rising. "Forget about the Moon, we’re losing the computing space race," warns an outspoken US Senator. Startups and small businesses worldwide love China's open access fabs, democratizing space tech, but whispers of hidden ‘backdoors’ fuel cyber paranoia.

As 2D chips propel humanity onward and upward, one thing is clear: The future of computing is infinitely thin, and infinitely high.