The first wave of traditional PhD students born after the year 1999 will graduate in the summer of 2026. We’ll see an influx of highly-educated adults enter the various open job markets with fresh ideas, new ways of thinking, and absolutely no clue what life was like before the internet.
This isn’t a bad thing. These PhDs and their non-traditionally educated peers represent the vanguard of a new era. They’re “Generation AGI.”
In their lifetimes, they’ll go from watching their favorite kids shows on DVD and learning computer code as part of their normal school curriculum, to living in a world where everyone has access to an artificial intelligence agent in their pocket and cars that can drive themselves.
They might live to see wonders that many of us can only dream about. Sure, they might also see new horrors and face existential crises heretofore unseen by humans. But, just for once, let’s see what it feels like to be optimistic.
The class of 2026
The baby boomer generation was born into a world where television was becoming ubiquitous and humanity had begun sharing cultural ideas in ways that radio programs and newspaper articles simply couldn’t.
My generation, usually called Generation X, was born into a world where network television would quickly give way to scores of dedicated cable and satellite channels representing every imaginable human interest. Many of us began gravitating towards personal computers, but the internet wouldn’t become popular until the next generation, millennials, began to come of age.
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And, while the internet surely gave millennials access to more knowledge and information than any generation in human history, the current generation entering the job market has the unique benefit of having a superhuman librarian to help them parse all that info: ChatGPT and its ilk.
We used to spend hours Googling topics that interested us and going down Wikipedia and arXiv rabbit holes for days on end. Now, using any of the myriad available large language models, we can skip all that searching and get straight to the meat. It’s an exciting time to be a knowledge geek.
Imagine, fellow over-40s, what we could have accomplished in our youth if we were born into an internet-laden world where we could watch a lecture from professor Stephen Hawking on YouTube any time we wanted and ChatGPT was always available to explain calculus, chemistry, or Roman history to us.
Oh, the books I would have read as a child with an Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription!
And when it comes to the singularity — to finally cracking the code and unlocking true artificial general intelligence — it feels like the odds are pretty good it could happen in their lifetime.
It’s not all sunshine and roses, of course. We haven’t exactly been the greatest of global stewards. So, yes, there will be pain in the future too. As we’ve seen in the current AI-powered war in Iran and amid growing concerns related to the mental health of chatbot users, the road to AGI is paved with both good intentions and blood.
And sure, there are no guarantees that any of the AI models currently in use will actually lead to artificial general intelligence. Admittedly, it feels like the technology is hitting a wall.
But walls always look a little shorter to the next generation when they’re standing on our shoulders.
The real question we should be pondering as we turn toward the future isn’t whether we can develop AGI; it’s whether we should. Our publisher, KB Miller, recently interviewed world-renowned machine ethicist David Gunkel and that very question came up.
“So, here’s the really interesting thing: you can’t know if you should go there or not until you try. In other words, if you could know that in advance, you would have this kind of epistemological certitude that is only possessed by the divine … if there is one. We don’t know. We live in finitude. We live in a temporally limited framework.”
Gunkel’s answer aligns well with the notion that, until we build AGI, we’ll have no idea what it’s capable of. That might sound scary, but as he explains in the full interview (which we’ll be publishing over several issues!), it’s been the same for just about every technological inflection point in human history from the discovery of fire to the mass proliferation of the world wide web.
Whether AGI is right around the corner or decades away, the prescription remains unchanged: the sooner we figure out how we’re going to treat artificial agents with moral standing, the more prepared we’ll be for their arrival.
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A veteran AI journalist, Tristan was the creator and managing editor of The Next Web’s “Neural” imprint. He is one of the first and most prolific reporters to cover artificial intelligence as a full-time beat.