Predicting the “digital superpowers” we could have by 2030

It’s 2025, the year when mainstream computing will start to shift from a race to develop increasingly powerful tools to a race to develop increasingly powerful abilities. The difference between a tool and an ability is subtle yet profound. From the very first hammerstones to the latest quantum computers, tools are external artifacts that help us humans overcome our organic limitations. Humanity’s ingenious tools have greatly expanded what we can accomplish as individuals, teams, and massive civilizations.

Abilities are different. We experience abilities in the first person as self-embodied capabilities that feel internal and instantly accessible to our conscious minds. For example, language and mathematics are human technologies that we install in our brains and carry around with us throughout our lives, expanding our abilities to think, create, and collaborate. They are genuine superpowers and they feel so inherent to our existence that we rarely think of them as technologies at all. 

Unlike our verbal and mathematical superpowers, the next wave of superhuman abilities will require some hardware, but we will still experience them as self-embodied skills that we carry around with us throughout our lives. These abilities will emerge from the convergence of AI, augmented reality, and conversational computing. They will be unleashed by context-aware AI agents that are loaded into body-worn devices that see what we see, hear what we hear, experience what we experience, and provide us with enhanced abilities to perceive and interpret our world. I refer to this new technological direction as augmented mentality and I predict that by 2030, a majority of us will live our lives with context-aware AI agents bringing digital superpowers into our daily experiences.  

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