Letter to 2035: When AGI Is the Baseline
Once AGI handles every How, the only human value left is asking What and Why.
The Premise
Imagine waking up in 2035. AGI isn't a headline anymore — it's infrastructure. Like electricity or TCP/IP, it hums beneath everything, invisible and assumed. Every "how" question has been answered: how to diagnose, how to optimize, how to build, how to translate, how to code.
The interesting question isn't whether AGI arrives. It's what happens to human value when it does.
The Inversion of Skill
For centuries, we've prized competence — the ability to execute. Surgeons, engineers, lawyers, programmers. These roles exist because the "how" is hard. But when inference is free, execution becomes commodity. The surgeon's hand is replaced by a robotic arm guided by a model with 10 million successful procedures in its weights.
What remains? The decision to operate in the first place. The conversation with the patient about what a good life means with six months left. The ethical weight of choosing who gets the scarce organ.
Skill becomes cheap. Judgment becomes priceless.
This isn't a utopian fantasy. It's an economic inevitability. When the marginal cost of execution approaches zero, the only scarce resource is intent — knowing what to build, and why.
The New Literacy
In 2035, the divide won't be between those who can code and those who can't. It will be between those who can ask precise questions and those who accept default answers.
Consider: if anyone can generate a feature-complete application in minutes, the differentiator isn't the app. It's the insight that said app needed to exist. The user who noticed a friction point no one else saw. The founder who understood a market's unspoken anxiety.
Prompt engineering was the early rehearsal. But the real skill is problem framing — the ability to define the boundaries of a question before any model touches it.
The Anxiety Trap
Here's where most future-gazing goes wrong: it assumes emotional stasis. People read "AGI replaces execution" and feel terror. That terror is rational — but only within the current frame.
Reframe: every previous technological revolution destroyed roles and created new categories of meaning. The printing press didn't just displace scribes; it birthed journalism, novels, scientific publishing, public discourse. The internet didn't just kill retail; it created the creator economy, open source, and global real-time collaboration.
AGI won't just eliminate jobs. It will eliminate the concept of jobs as we know them and replace it with something we don't yet have vocabulary for.
A Letter, Not a Prediction
This isn't a forecast. Forecasts are for analysts. This is a letter — from the present to the future, written in the hope that whoever reads it in 2035 will smile at how much we underestimated.
Dear 2035: we were scared. We were also right to be excited.
The only mistake would have been to decelerate.