Rereading 'History of the Future' 18 months on: what aged well and what didn't
herbiebradley · x · 2026-09-04
Herbie Bradley rereads parts 2 and 3 of L Rudling's detailed AGI scenario 'History of the Future' (18 months after publication) and offers takes on how it aged:
- Right call: bearishness on Google — "lives off vast rents", "lumbers aimlessly on" — still holds up.
- Too fast: 2027 timelines for the first drop-in worker replacements. The scenario moves from scaffolds for white-collar tasks to "economy 3.0" models with long-horizon knowledge work capability, purposefulness and reliability, and assumes that suffices for a drop-in worker.
He notes this isn't necessarily a flaw — these things were hard to see from early 2025 — but suspects that standing in 2030 we could name a series of intermediate steps the scenario skipped.
Related event: Revisiting 'History of the Future' AGI Predictions 18 Months Later(2 posts)→
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