I’ve been traveling the past week, first to Belgrade to visit my ex flatmate Sasha, and now to my hometown of Zagreb to visit family. I know, riveting stuff.
I’m telling you this for context. My mind’s not really on work, and it hasn’t been for days now. Nonetheless, I make a daily commitment to write this daily email. But since my mind hasn’t been on work, I find myself depleted of ideas.
What to write about… today?
When I find myself in situations like this, one of my go-to’s is to check Hacker News, an online newsboard curated by nerds. There’s often something there to jog my vacation-y brain into action.
And so it was today.
I found a trending story called “AI 2040: Plan A.”
In a nutshell, a bunch of nerds (again) got together and wrote up a bunch of scenarios of how, by 2040, AI will either destroy us or it will destroy the things we love, like freedom.
Yawn, I said.
(Bear with me, because this finally gets relevant to you, at least if you have a personal brand or if you write online.)
I asked myself why I was yawning at this trending story about a catastrophic prediction of the highest relevance to the human race.
The answer that came was that people have been dooming about AI for a while now. In other words, the prediction itself is nothing new. Plus, the timeline for the prediction is 2040, which in AI years might as well be 3040.
Now here’s the interesting bit:
This same bunch of nerds who wrote the “AI 2040” report wrote another report back in 2025.
That report was called “AI 2027.” It predicted that by 2027, AI would have superhuman intelligence, at least in the AI-programming realm, with all sorts of technological, political, and economic circumstances that we could see, all within 24 months.
I remember reading that report when it came out and being really captivated by it. Maybe I even wrote an email about it then.
So what’s the difference? Why did the 2025 report captivate me and this new report did not?
Again, the prediction in 2025 was something I had heard a million times before — that AI would eventually become better than humans, and it would lead to this “much better than humans” loop, with crazy consequences.
But the unique thing with the earlier report was the very tight deadline — within just 2 years of the writing of the report.
So let’s pull it all together in a way that pays finally this off for you:
1. I recently wrote an email in which I shared consulting guru Alan Weiss’s advice to people who want to be seen as experts:
“Experts make predictions. They don’t fret about whether they’ll be right, they don’t keep score, and then have no regrets. If you’re afraid to make a prediction because you may be wrong, then you’re no expert.”
2. In order for a prediction to have value, you need one of two things to be true, or preferably both. You either have to make a prediction others haven’t heard before, or you have to make a prediction with a much sooner and more definite timeline than others have made before.
Standup comedian Andrew Schulz once said:
“Comedy is a bullfight, and the premise is the bull. You want a big dangerous bull. The crowd boos if you’re fighting a baby bull.”
And so it is with making predictions.
Speaking of:
Let me tell you about Influence 2027.
A couple weeks ago, The Economist reported that in 2026 the hottest new hires at Open AI and Anthropic are not programmers or data scientists. Rather, they are philosophy majors, who are helping shape the AI models in all sorts of Socratic and Platonic ways.
But that’s so 2026. Here’s my prediction for 2027:
In 2027, the hottest hires at OpenAI and Anthropic will not be programmers, data, scientists, OR philosophers.
Rather, they will be direct response copywriters, standup comedians, stage magicians, and other influence professionals, who understand the triggers and tradeoffs of human psychological drives.
In 2027, knowledge of human psychology, and specifically, of human motivations and inhibitions, will become the deciding factor whether the AI-generated stuff you produce gets people to move, or gets them to yawn, just like that “AI 2040” report made me yawn earlier today.
If you wanna be ready for this heady future, which is coming up imminently, my recommendation is to learn from the best of the best of influence professionals, across many disciplines, and to focus on what they all do in common.
Fortunately, I’ve prepared a by-the-numbers field guide for you about exactly that topic. It’s waiting for you here: