2026

You stop opening an AI tool and start simply asking. The assistant lives in the address bar, the document, the inbox, and the phone. It summarizes, drafts, plans, and acts. For many people the first place they look for an answer is no longer a list of links.

Folded AI into the basic interfaces of computing, shifting how people find information and get work done.

Instead of clicking through ten pages, you describe an outcome and an agent does the clicking. It compares, fills in, pays, and reports back. Websites start optimizing for software readers as much as human ones, and a new kind of traffic appears that never looks at a screen.

Signals a shift from browsing to delegation, changing what websites are built for and how they are monetized.

For thirty years, search meant a page of links and an implicit bargain: we send you traffic, you make content. When the answer appears directly, the click stops happening. Publishers watch referrals fall and start asking what the web is for when nobody visits it.

Threatens the traffic-for-content bargain that funded much of the web. Reshapes publishing, SEO, and discovery.

The first broad law written for artificial intelligence starts to bite. Companies must disclose how certain systems work, label generated content, and prove they manage risk. The rules apply to anyone serving European users, so the whole industry feels the change.

Establishes the first comprehensive legal framework for AI and sets a de facto global standard, much like GDPR did.

Quantum hardware and error correction continue to improve, but useful large-scale quantum computing remains an open research goal. The race also motivates work on post-quantum cryptography.

Progress in this area could eventually change computing and security, even while practical applications remain uncertain.

For a few years the best models were locked behind a handful of APIs. Then open models catch up, and suddenly a student, a startup, or a government can run a capable assistant on a machine they control. Power over AI starts to spread outward.

Democratizes access to frontier AI and challenges the dominance of a few closed labs, echoing the open-source movement.

The first headsets were heavy, expensive, and mostly a demo. A few generations later they are comfortable enough to wear for an afternoon. Digital objects sit on real desks, meetings have presence, and the boundary between screen and room starts to blur.

Moves computing past the flat screen toward spatial interfaces, reviving the promise of virtual and augmented reality.

The screen was never the point, it was just the best interface we had. Now the house listens, the watch measures, the glasses annotate, and the assistant anticipates. Computing stops being a destination and becomes a layer over daily life — convenient, and a little unsettling.

Continues the shift from devices you visit to an environment that surrounds you, raising new questions about privacy.

The web completed its profound transition from passive hypertext documents to an active agentic ecosystem. Rather than clicking through flight aggregators, hotel reviews, and multi-step checkouts, users dispatched autonomous agents that negotiated prices, scheduled calendars, and synthesized personalized research briefs directly across authenticated web protocols.

It represented the third major architectural revolution of the World Wide Web after the static web and Web 2.0 social platforms.

As generative synthetic media became ubiquitous, society developed an insatiable appetite for guaranteed human connection. Camera manufacturers, media organizations, and browsers standardized C2PA cryptographic hardware provenance signatures to verify untampered real-world capture. Simultaneously, an analog renaissance celebrated vinyl records, film cameras, handwritten journals, and unassisted human prose.

It established verifiable truth and physical authenticity as the ultimate luxury commodities of the high-speed digital age.