5 Things That Will Happen in the Next Few Years

I keep a list of things I think will happen in the next few years.

When I share it with people, most of them think I’m exaggerating. I don’t think I am.

Everything below is backed by real research, real funding, and in most cases, real products you can already buy. Some of this is already happening.

1. You’ll Have a Robot at Home

Not a Roomba. A humanoid robot that walks around your house, folds laundry, clears the table, and helps with daily chores.

Pre-orders are already open.

1X Technologies started shipping its NEO robot to U.S. homes in 2026. It costs $20,000 upfront or $499 a month. It weighs 30kg, has human-level hand dexterity, and can unload a dishwasher, water plants, and tidy up. It’s not perfect. It still falls over sometimes and needs human help. But it exists, and people are buying it.

Tesla’s Optimus is targeting external customer sales by late 2027, at a projected price of $20,000 to $30,000. Tesla has already deployed around 5,000 units inside its own factories. The Gen 2.5 model can walk autonomously, handle objects, and has 11-degree-of-freedom tactile hands.

Then there’s Unitree, a Chinese company selling the R1 for $5,900. Less than a used car.

Figure AI raised $1.9 billion and ran its Figure 02 robot for 11 months of daily 10-hour shifts at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, loading over 90,000 parts for 30,000+ vehicles. It was the first to demo fully autonomous laundry folding.

Goldman Sachs revised its humanoid robot market forecast 6x upward to $38 billion by 2035, projecting 1.4 million unit shipments and 70% annual growth. Manufacturing costs have dropped from $50,000-$250,000 per unit to $30,000-$150,000 in a single year.

The robots won’t run your household flawlessly in 2026. But by 2028-2030, they’ll be as common as smart home devices are today.

2. We’ll Have Treatments That Reverse Aging

Not slow it down. Reverse it. And with that, diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia, and cardiovascular disease start to disappear.

In January 2026, the FDA cleared the first-ever human trial of epigenetic reprogramming. Life Biosciences, co-founded by Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, is testing a treatment called ER-100 on glaucoma patients using OSK factors. These are the same Yamanaka factors that won Shinya Yamanaka the Nobel Prize. Results are expected late 2026 or early 2027.

To understand why this matters: when researchers used these same OSK factors on elderly mice, they extended their median remaining lifespan by 109%.

The money flowing into longevity science is staggering. Altos Labs has raised $5.56 billion. Retro Biosciences, backed by Sam Altman, raised a $1 billion Series A and is already running its first human trial. They partnered with OpenAI to make their reprogramming process 50x more efficient using AI.

In 2024 alone, venture capital poured $8.5 billion into longevity startups. That doubled from the year before. The total longevity market is projected to hit $600 billion by 2028.

And it’s not just about living longer. A 2025 study published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia found that 37% of dementia cases could be prevented by addressing the underlying cardiometabolic conditions that aging drives. Another study showed that NAD+ restoration reversed tau phosphorylation and neuroinflammation in mice, producing full cognitive recovery. If you’re interested in the longevity angle, I wrote about why vigorous exercise matters more than most people think.

The TRIIM trial demonstrated 2.5 years of epigenetic age reversal in humans after just one year of treatment. That result held six months after treatment ended.

We’ve crossed from theoretical to clinical for the first time in history. The question is no longer whether we can reverse aging. It’s how fast the treatments reach the rest of us.

3. AI Will Handle 80% of Knowledge Work

If your job is mostly reading, writing, analyzing, or making decisions, a significant chunk of it is already being done by AI.

McKinsey estimates that 57% of U.S. work hours are automatable with current technology. Factor in generative AI specifically, and that number jumps to 60-70%.

A Harvard and BCG study found that knowledge workers using GPT-4 completed 12.2% more tasks, finished them 25.1% faster, and produced 40% higher quality output.

GitHub Copilot now has 20 million users. 46% of all code on GitHub is AI-generated. 90% of Fortune 100 companies have adopted it.

In legal, 92% of professionals use at least one AI tool daily. JPMorgan’s COiN system saves 360,000 hours of legal review per year. Harvey AI, a legal AI startup, hit a $2 billion valuation after being adopted by top U.S. law firms.

The job cuts are already visible. In 2025, 55,000 jobs were eliminated with companies explicitly citing AI as the reason. That’s 12 times the number from two years prior. Klarna said its AI handles the work of 853 employees. Salesforce cut its customer support team from 9,000 to 5,000 using AI agents. If you’re wondering whether to hire someone or use AI, the calculus is shifting fast.

U.S. productivity jumped roughly 2.7% in 2025, nearly double the 1.4% decade average.

The 80% figure is aggressive as a statement about today. But as trajectory, it’s hard to argue against. Anthropic predicts powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis says AGI is “a handful of years away.” The gap between AI benchmark performance and expert-level human performance collapsed from 6.5 years to under 14 months.

If you’re in knowledge work and you’re not using AI yet, you’re already behind. I’ve written about the human skills that become more valuable as AI takes over the routine stuff.

4. Every Kid Gets a Personalized AI Tutor

In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom discovered something remarkable. Students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations above students in traditional classrooms. He called it the 2-sigma problem: we know tutoring works dramatically better, but we can’t afford to give every child a personal tutor.

AI is solving that.

A 2025 randomized controlled trial published in Nature found that students using an AI tutor achieved learning gains more than double those of students in active-learning classrooms. They learned more, in less time.

Khan Academy’s Khanmigo went from 68,000 users to 1.4 million in under two years. It costs $44 per year per student. A human tutor costs $50 to $150 per hour.

In China, Squirrel AI ran a randomized trial across 1,700+ schools in 200+ cities. Students using AI outperformed those taught by expert human teachers in math. Reasoning accuracy went up 16.8%. The biggest improvements came from the weakest students.

South Korea has committed to providing an AI tutor for every student. Singapore launched a national AI literacy initiative targeting all levels by 2026. In the U.S., 63% of school districts now use student-centered AI tools.

Schools don’t disappear. Kids still need physical experiences, socialization, sports, lab work, field trips. But the one-size-fits-all classroom lecture? The model where 30 kids learn the same thing at the same pace? That part is on its way out.

The AI tutor market was $7 billion in 2025. It’s projected to hit $136 billion by 2035.

5. Your Doctor Will Be AI First

The next time you get a diagnosis, there’s a growing chance an AI saw your results before your doctor did.

There are now over 1,450 FDA-authorized AI medical devices. 295 were cleared in 2025 alone. 76% are in radiology.

In Sweden, the MASAI trial screened 105,934 women for breast cancer. AI-supported mammography detected 29% more cancers than traditional screening, with 12% fewer interval cancers and 44% less radiologist workload. Sweden has already started deploying this in regional programs.

A meta-analysis of AI in dermatology found AI achieving 87% sensitivity and 77.1% specificity, outperforming clinicians at 79.8% and 73.6% on the same measures.

Google’s Med-Gemini scored 91.1% on the U.S. medical licensing exam. Their AMIE system arrived at the correct diagnosis 60% of the time, versus 34% for unassisted doctors.

In emergency rooms, an AI triage system tested across 174,648 visits at three hospitals outperformed traditional triage methods by a significant margin.

The industry consensus for 2026 is that the “pilot era is officially over.” AI is moving into daily clinical operations as the first layer of diagnosis, with human doctors reviewing what the AI flags.

Your doctor doesn’t disappear. The role evolves. AI reads your scans, analyzes your bloodwork, cross-references your symptoms, and generates a preliminary diagnosis. Your doctor reviews it, adds judgment, and talks to you. It’s a better system for everyone.

The World My Kids Will Inherit

I have young kids. I think about this constantly.

The world they’re growing up in looks nothing like the one I grew up in. They might never experience age-related disease. An AI tutor that knows exactly how they learn could replace most of their classroom lectures. A doctor powered by AI might catch something a human would miss. And a robot might fold their laundry.

Every prediction in this article is backed by peer-reviewed research, real companies, and billions in investment. None of it is science fiction. The science is here. The products are shipping.

I’ve written before about how AI is making us more human, not less. This is what I mean. These technologies don’t replace what matters. They free us up to focus on it.

Most people aren’t paying attention yet. I think they should be.

I can’t wait.