Prof Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly blog about the creativity, the game industry, artificial intelligence, distributed computing, and everything creatives and designers might find interesting in tech.

They say write about what scares you. Well... My fear is the motivation of this week's essay.

The Vision of Arthur C. Clark

We're moving fast.

It's hard to know where we are going. Sometimes we look to writers to imagine that future for us.

Arthur Clark has had a profound effect on a lot of our thinking in the development of technology. Space, robots, telecommunications and many other ideas were all nurtured concepts in the futures he imagined.

These days, I'm not thinking about “2001,” but the 1953 novel that kept me up at night when I was in my 20's. It's called "Childhood's End." If you haven't read it, it's about how devil-looking aliens visit us to prepare humans for the arrival of a cosmic superintelligence.

This unsettling vision of humanity’s future is not one where we conquer the stars, but where we and our "mid-wife alien guides" watch helplessly as our children evolve beyond us. The book’s most devastating scene unfolds as the last adult generation of humans bears witness to their children merging with “The Overmind.”

These children, physically still human but mentally transformed, gradually disconnect from their parents and human concerns. They gather together, develop telepathic abilities, and eventually transcend physical form altogether, leaving the rest of humanity behind as mere evolutionary footnotes.

I still remember closing the book and staring into stunned space, disturbed not by the end of humanity but by the profound separation it depicted—parents watching their children become something utterly beyond their comprehension. It seemed like pure science fiction then. But, the kind of sci-fi you can shake off in a day or so.

These days, I’m having a hard time shaking it off.

...

The New Productivity Divide

The divisions are already forming.

While many are barely aware of ChatGPT, corporate systems are developing swarms of agentic systems. The productivity gains for those who know how to leverage AI technology will be staggering—not incremental improvements—but exponential leaps from what was previously possible.

Startups and corporations that effectively integrate AI systems will rocket ahead of their competitors. A single professional augmented by sophisticated AI tools can now perform work that previously required entire departments. Code that once took teams of developers months to create can be generated in days by a single skilled prompt engineer directing AI systems. This transformation is not hypothetical—it’s actively unfolding in the new wave of products coming out. Anthropic's MCP standard, Manus' Agentic System, and tooling in every cloud platform from Amazon to Microsoft.

Forget generating a single image, agentic workflows are here.

Companies are already augmenting their productivity while simultaneously laying off humans who “get in the way” of these streamlined, automated workflows. The economics are simply too compelling to ignore. Why maintain a team of 50 when 5 people with the right AI tools can outperform them? For those with the skills, mindset, and access to leverage these technologies, this represents unprecedented opportunity.

For everyone else, it might mean obsolescence … and a need to evolve.

...

The Warning

We’ve already witnessed how technology can fundamentally transform an entire generation’s cognitive and behavioral makeup. Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” provides compelling evidence of how social media—a relatively simple algorithmic technology compared to today’s AI—has fundamentally rewired adolescent psychology. As Haidt meticulously documents...

the generation that grew up with smartphones and social media has become less socially adept in person but more connected online, more anxious, more depressed, and more fragile.

What’s most striking about Haidt’s findings is the way social media created a youth culture organized around collective validation rather than individual resilience.

Today’s young people are hypersensitive to the needs and opinions of their peer group but increasingly lack the psychological strength to stand as individuals who might break ranks or challenge collective thinking. They’ve been networked together in ways that have literally changed their brains—creating neural patterns optimized for digital approval but ill-suited for the messy complexities of real-world human interaction.

If mere social media could reshape an entire generation so profoundly, what will AI agents do? We can already see the bifurcation happening along generational lines.

These aren’t merely different usage patterns; they represent fundamentally different relationships with artificial intelligence. The younger generation isn’t just using AI; they’re co-evolving with it. Their thinking processes, creative approaches, and problem-solving strategies are developing in tandem with these systems.

All thru chat, they talk about their friends, their family, their emotions. It isn't just a tool for homework, it's a life coach for every moment of the day. Many are forming relationships with AI, some, perhaps dangerously, are romantically involved.

Like the children in Clarke’s novel who developed abilities their parents couldn’t share, this generation is developing cognitive frameworks their elders struggle to comprehend. As agent technology rolls out over the next few years, this divide will only deepen. The first wave brought us conversational AI like ChatGPT and Claude.

The coming (scratch that --- current) wave will bring us autonomous agents that can perform complex workflows across research, writing, and marketing without continuous human guidance. The wave after that will automate programming, artistic creation, and project management. Each wave will make the technology more accessible while simultaneously making the gap between users and non-users more profound.

The result may not be a class divide in the traditional economic sense, but something more akin to a species divide. Small teams—even individuals—could become astonishingly productive, balancing vision and creativity with GPU compute resources. A single person with the right skills and tools might accomplish what previously required hundreds.

...

Childhood’s Continuation?

Where does this leave the rest of humanity?

Like the parents in “Childhood’s End,” we may find ourselves watching as a portion of our species evolve into a productivity level that we can't participate in. Unlike Clarke’s novel, this evolution won’t be driven by cosmic intervention but by our own creations—tools that were meant to serve us but may end up transforming us instead.

We face a critical question:

Can we openly discuss fundamentally reinventing our computing paradigms to maximize human behavior and well-being?

Or will the current trajectory continue, with agents automating every meaningful aspect of our lives except our most basic instincts for social validation—liking, thumbs-upping, and resharing content created by AI?

Here are more from my 3 AM worries:

Do we want a world where a small elite leverages these tools to achieve godlike productivity while others become increasingly irrelevant?

Or can we find ways to democratize these capabilities, ensuring that AI augmentation becomes a “rising tide that lifts all boats?”

The age of agents is literally beginning.

How we respond to it may determine our transformation—and whether that transformation will be inclusive or divisive. Unlike the parents in Clarke’s novel, we can't be passive observers.

We still have time to shape what comes next. At least that's how I'm going with it.

If you vibe to the ideas I express here, please consider subscribing and sharing with friends. What do you think? Let's democratize AI for everyone?

Thanks for reading. We'll see you next time.

Nye Warburton is an educator and technologist who believes in the creativity of human spirit. This essay was created with improvisational sessions in Otter.ai and edited using Claude Sonnet 3.7. Images prompted in Flow State with Leonardo.ai. For more information visit: https://nyewarburton.com

Start with Agents

Windsurf - An agentic IDE that allows structured "Vibe Coding"

Manus - An agentic system that can search the internet, research, write and do tasks.

Open Interpreter - An open source conversational interface for running local models with Ollama, Jan or LM Studio

Google - Gemini is rapidly evolving, Use the Deep Research function to help you scour the internet.

Other Essays:

Godlike Tools, Creative Stagnation - April 27, 2025

Disruptions in Gaming: A Hypothesis - January 7, 2025

Rethinking Innovation: AI and the Problem with Objectives - December 26, 2024