Listen to Steve read this post below.
Sounds like a ridiculous question, right? But here’s the thing: I expect the AI era will be largely “done” in about 7 years.
That’s not a throwaway hot take. It’s grounded in one of tech’s most underappreciated truths: every major technology era is lasting half as long as the one before it.
Let me walk you through it:
🚙 The car – the Model T took over society around 120 years ago.
📺 Then came television, which entered the fore roughly 60 years ago.
🖥 The internet has had a 30-year run so far.
📱 The smartphone became central to daily life just over 15 years ago.
🤖 And now we have LLMs and AI, born during 2022 in a mainstream sense. I reckon their reign will be surpassed around 2030.
This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the Law of Accelerating Returns in action. Each technology not only speeds up the world—it speeds up the arrival of its successor. Every era carries the seed of its replacement.
And that seed? It’s already germinating.
The Quantum Age is Next
It’s the next big shift. And it’s going to change the world in unrecognisable ways, mainly because we’ll rebuild it… atom by atom.
The Quantum Age refers to a time when quantum mechanics—the strange, probabilistic rules governing subatomic particles—stop being just a theory and start becoming the foundation of how we build the world.
Let that sink in: we’re talking about engineering reality at the molecular level.
If the AI era is about training machines to think, the Quantum Age will be about reprogramming the universe itself.
‘Virtual Physicality’
This is going to make the AI revolution feel like dial-up. The Quantum Age is when humanity goes from manipulating data to manipulating matter. From bits to atoms. From software that lives on screens to tech that rewires the physical world.
We’re entering a time when nature becomes programmable. We won’t just build apps—we’ll build and reprogram materials, cells, tissues, and even life itself.
If AI was about teaching machines to think, the Quantum Age is about teaching them to build reality—an era of Virtual Physicality.
What Does the Quantum Age Mean?
It’s the industrial revolution of the molecular world. Where code and chemistry fuse. Where science fiction turns into instruction manuals.
We’re talking about:
- Turning bits into atoms with advanced 3D printing—not just plastics, concrete, and metals, but living tissue and custom-designed compounds.
- Reprogramming biology using tools like CRISPR to cure disease, extend life, and engineer organisms to change their shape and capability.
- Nanobots that patrol the bloodstream, repairing damage, killing cancer, and enhancing immunity.
- Molecular assemblers—machines that build anything, even fuels, atom by atom. A Star Trek–style replicator.
- Quantum computers that model reality itself, allowing us to simulate chemistry, physics, and materials faster than nature does—so we can rebuild it.
This is the era where matter becomes editable—just like information did. Where nature is not only understood—it’s rewritten, then rebuilt.
What Happens to AI?
It becomes the operating system of the physical world.
- AI designs the blueprints: quantum circuits, genetic codes, nano machines.
- Quantum computes them.
- Nanobots deploy them.
The new supply chain? It goes from thoughts to things.
So yeah… asking “What comes after AI?” isn’t folly—it’s essential. Because by the time your smart mirror diagnoses illness before your doctor, we’ll be editing life, sculpting reality, and printing the future.
It’s not your imagination—everything is speeding up. Even the future itself.
Keep Thinking,
Steve.
(Hey – Thanks for reading – it means a lot. Be sure to get me in for a keynote on AI ‘specific to your industry’ at your next event or, company get together. I’ll blow everyones mind and make you look rad! – Special rates for blog subscribers 😉 – Contact here. Love Stevie)