When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, and why other people expect slower changes, I think a big component is disagreement on the extent to which AI will affect non-computer work. Sure, programming has sped up massively with Claude Code etc, and models like Astra seem posed to make similar changes to work with spreadsheets and other common business tools, but what about work that doesn't include computers at all?

The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do. Leaning into the way the world has become very scifi, we could call this "teleoperating" people. Many things that are hard for robots are very easy for people, there are strong economic reasons that push towards teleoperation, and this bypasses many legal and social limitations on what AI can do. We should expect this to lead to large and rapid changes in the physical world.

One of the most widespread examples today is driving. I put my destination into the GPS, and it tells me what to do. I handle the low-level physical motions and responding to the local circumstances; the GPS has a broader view of the world and handles the strategy.

When I think about why this happened much earlier than the huge amount of "teleoperation" I expect to see soon, a few factors. Driving is a major human activity, so it was worth making navigation software at a time when AI wasn't very good yet, even though this meant a ton of human hours going into building the system. It was also a place where the strategic component was a very strong fit for automation. You can memorize the map with enough work, but even then you won't have real-time street-by-street traffic information. AI solved this problem so well we don't even call it "AI" anymore. On the other hand, driving is a realtime control problem in an unconstrained environment where people die if you screw up and you can't even always safely stop. This makes it hard to automate, but also would make it impractical for an AI to guide non-drivers through the process. The only reason Uber etc have been able to commodify driving as they have is that so many people already know how to drive.

Thinking about where else we might see this, most AI use today looks a lot like management. You figure out wha...

Jacob Asmuth

Jacob Asmuth