September 2026

AI, by generation

Not predictions. Not advice. Just an honest look at what is already happening and where it is going, depending on where you are in life right now.

Perspective:
60s
The fundamentals are fine. One specific thing is not.

The day-to-day is not going to change dramatically in whatever working years are left. The judgment, the relationships, the way you read situations. That stuff holds.

The one thing worth paying close attention to: the scam infrastructure is getting much more sophisticated specifically because of AI. Voice cloning, deepfakes, phishing that sounds and looks exactly like someone you know. The protection that older generations had was that bad actors were obvious. That is basically gone now.

Any institution leaning on AI to ask for more of your trust deserves more skepticism, not less. The technology makes it easier to fake credibility, not harder.

The rest of the noise around AI is probably fine to tune out. The people who get left behind are usually the ones who decided it had nothing to do with them.

You have probably already spent decades operating inside systems that were not designed for you. That is not a detail. It means you have a kind of adaptability that most people around you are only just starting to develop.

Same scam infrastructure warning as the male side. Voice cloning, deepfakes, synthetic phishing. The obvious-scam protection is gone.

The thing built through friction, reading rooms, navigating around obstacles, building real trust with real people, is exactly what the next decade values most. Not because it is wholesome. Because it is hard to automate.
30s
The most exposed decade. Also the most positioned to move.

Old enough to have built real skills and a career identity. Young enough that the next 30 years of working life are going to look completely different from the last 10. That is the uncomfortable position the 30s are sitting in right now.

The skills built so far are not worthless. But a lot of the specific workflows, the job titles, the career ladders, those are getting restructured faster than most institutions are admitting. Mid-career disruption is real and underreported because it is less dramatic than entry-level displacement.

The people who come through this decade well are the ones who stay close to the actual output of their work rather than the process around it. The process is what gets automated. The judgment about what the output should be is harder to touch.

If there are kids, or that is coming, you are raising the first generation where algorithm exposure and screen time have genuinely high neurological stakes. Not in a moral panic way. In a documented, measurable way. That distinction matters.

The 30s are also when the compounding of the attention economy becomes visible in hindsight. The habits built in the 20s start showing up as either assets or deficits. Worth being honest about which side of that you are on.

Everything above applies. And there is a specific layer here too.

The 30s are when career momentum and biological timeline pressures tend to collide. AI is now being used in hiring systems, performance reviews, and promotion decisions in ways that are not transparent and that carry the biases of whoever trained them. That is not speculation. It is already being documented.

The decisions being made right now about who gets flagged by an algorithm as a flight risk, who gets passed over in an automated screen, are happening without much oversight and with very little legal recourse. Knowing that is not paranoia. It is context.

On the raising kids dimension: same as the male side, but with the additional concern about what the image generation and social media ecosystem is already doing to girls specifically. The girls entering adolescence now are the test case. The data is not good.

The 30s are also a decade where real influence tends to concentrate, in communities, workplaces, families. That is worth using deliberately rather than letting it happen by default.

20s
Entering at a complicated time. The map has changed.

The traditional path is breaking. Degree, entry level job, learn from people above you, build up over time. AI displacement hits the entry level first because that is where the most repetitive, high-volume knowledge work sits.

The counterintuitive read: do not compete with it on the things it is good at. Speed, volume, pattern recognition, drafts. Focus on what is actually hard to automate. Being physically present, making judgment calls with real stakes, directing creative work rather than executing it, building relationships that are not transactional.

The split that is coming is not AI versus people. It is people who know how to use it versus people who do not. That gap is already opening.

The other thing, and this sounds abstract but is not: your attention is a financial asset right now. Just not for you. Every hour that goes into passive consumption is compounding something for someone else. At this age the compounding direction matters more than almost anything.

Everything above applies in full.

And then there is a layer on top of it that is specific and cannot be a footnote.

AI is already being used to generate non-consensual imagery, synthetic harassment, and deepfakes targeting women at scale. Not as a future risk. Right now. The infrastructure for it is expanding faster than any legal framework is responding to it.

This belongs in the centre of how you think about your digital presence, what you share, which platforms you trust. The legal system is not keeping up. That is the honest read on where things stand.

The rest of the noise, jobs, automation, tools, same deal as above. The combination of all of it is a heavier load. That is not a reason to be defeatist. It is just the accurate picture.

Newborn
This one is really for whoever is raising them.

The instinct in every education system and parenting culture is to prepare kids for the world as it currently exists. The categories of skills that will actually matter when he is 20 do not exist yet in their full form.

Optimising for the current world is probably the wrong move.

What holds regardless: being able to learn rather than just know things. Being able to sit with something complicated without needing it resolved immediately. Being able to build trust with other people in person. These are not going to be automated. Not because they are special, but because they are structurally too hard.

Information is going to be infinite and essentially free. The scarce thing is going to be the ability to do something real with it.

Same as above. Plus one additional layer worth being clear about.

The ecosystem that tells people who they are, what they should want, and what they should look like is going to be more sophisticated, more personalised, and louder by the time she is old enough to encounter it. That is not speculation. The trajectory is already visible.

Raising someone with a strong enough sense of themselves that external systems cannot do that work for them is a specific defence against a specific thing. Not a general platitude.

The fights around AI-generated harm targeting women need to be won in the next decade, before she is old enough to be directly affected. That work is happening now, slowly, in a lot of places that are not making headlines. Whether it lands in time is genuinely unclear.

The thing underneath all of it

Every powerful technology ends up being routed through whoever controls the capital. What gets built at scale reflects those incentives, not the stated intentions of the people who built it.

AI is not different. The version that cures diseases and the version that runs autonomous weapons and the version that destroys attention spans are all going to exist at the same time. Which one scales fastest depends on where the money is pointed, not on which one is most useful.

Knowing that is not a reason to disengage. It is just the accurate context for everything else.