A factual timeline of the AI shift — and why we are not all experiencing the same moment
I have to preface this by saying, I wrote and worked on this piece pre 28th of February, when US and Isreal attacked Iran. I do however think it is more relevant than ever so I am sharing it now. I hope you are safe, brave and blessed <3
There is something quietly disorienting happening right now that almost nobody is naming directly.
We are all technically living in March 2026. But we are not living in the same year.
Depending on when you first paid serious attention to artificial intelligence — and how deeply you followed it — you may be operating with a mental model that is anywhere from three years out of date to current. The gap between those positions is not a small one. It is the difference between thinking AI is a clever search engine and understanding that autonomous systems are already making decisions without human input. It is the difference between protecting your position inside an existing structure and quietly questioning whether that structure itself can hold, and wondering what will come next.
This is not a piece about who is paying attention and who is not. It is about the speed of change, the unevenness of access, and the unfamiliar feeling of realising it is March 2026 and that perhaps time has now fundamentally shifted.
All responses to experiencing the rise of AI and the changing of time — curiosity, anxiety, denial — are human. None of them are wrong.
Let’s have a look at the timeline shall we…
The Timeline
November 2022 — The starting gun
ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022. According to a UBS analysis cited by TIME magazine, it reached 100 million monthly active users within two months — faster than any consumer application in human history. TikTok required nine months to reach the same milestone. Instagram required two and a half years.
Most people experienced it as a curiosity. A useful toy. Something that wrote emails and summarised documents. Almost nobody — including, by their own subsequent admission, many of the people who built it — understood the scale of what had just been released into the world.
March 2023 — The people building it start to worry publicly
GPT-4 launched on 14 March 2023. It was multimodal — able to process both images and text — and demonstrated human-level performance on several professional benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam in approximately the top 10 percent of test takers.
In the same month, over 1,000 researchers and technologists signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development, citing societal and humanitarian risks. On 30 May 2023, hundreds of AI scientists and industry leaders — including Geoffrey Hinton, widely described as the godfather of modern AI, who had just resigned from Google to speak more freely — published a formal Statement on AI Risk: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
That statement was largely buried by the news cycle within a week.
2024 — The year it became structural
According to McKinsey’s State of AI report, 78 percent of organisations reported using AI in at least one business function by 2024 — up from 55 percent the year prior. OpenAI previewed Sora, a text-to-video model, demonstrating that the disruption would extend beyond images to video, voice, and human likeness. The European Union passed the world’s first comprehensive AI regulatory framework. Governments were drafting regulation approximately two years after it was needed.
2025 — The year of agents
This is where most people’s understanding currently stops. They still think AI is the thing that writes their emails. It is not, or not only.
McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report recorded that 88 percent of organisations now use AI in at least one business function, and that 62 percent were at minimum experimenting with AI agents — autonomous systems capable of planning, reasoning, and executing multi-step tasks without human instruction. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, drawing on a survey of 1,000 companies across 55 economies, projected that by 2030, 92 million existing roles will be displaced while 170 million new roles are created — a net gain globally, but one requiring the restructuring of 22 percent of all jobs and the obsolescence of 39 percent of existing skill sets within five years.
March 2026 — The reckoning
Steve Yegge, former engineering lead at Amazon, Google, and Sourcegraph, published a widely circulated essay in February 2026 describing what he calls the AI Vampire: the phenomenon of AI-driven productivity gains being absorbed entirely by employers, leaving workers exhausted without corresponding compensation or reduced hours. His proposed antidote was explicit: “Go touch grass every day. Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human.” He argued the sustainable new workday, once AI is genuinely integrated, is three to four hours of cognitive work.
AI is no longer an experiment running alongside normal operations. It is inside them. Caroline Clark, writing in her Substack Liftoff with Caroline in February 2026, identified a convergence of three simultaneous consolidations — economic, political, and informational — all accelerated by technology. Drawing on Yanis Varoufakis’ book Technofeudalism, she describes how the AI companies now emerging mirror the pattern of cloud computing in the 2010s: a race to claim territory, lock in customers, and charge rent for access to infrastructure rapidly becoming as essential as electricity. OpenAI is backed by Microsoft to the value of $13 billion. Anthropic by Google ($2.3 billion) and Amazon ($4 billion). The entities controlling the frontier models are a very small number of very large players. Everyone else pays for access to infrastructure they did not build and do not own.
The IMF published a working paper in April 2025 finding that AI-driven productivity gains compound existing wealth inequality: those with capital are better positioned to benefit from the returns AI generates, while those whose labour is displaced have fewer resources to retrain or reposition. The Center for Global Development has documented a parallel divergence between nations — wealthier countries positioned to use AI to enhance productivity in high-value sectors, widening the gap with economies that cannot afford equivalent adoption.
The structure is not failing dramatically. It is continuing to perform. It is asking us to perform along with it. And the gap between those performing fluency with the shift and those genuinely navigating it is widening — quietly, without announcement, every single day.
The Levels — What Year Are You Actually Living In?
This is not a hierarchy. It is a map. The same person may occupy different positions in different areas of their life simultaneously.
2022 thinking AI is a clever chatbot. Interesting as a novelty. Working and living largely as before. The shift is theoretical.
2023 thinking Using AI for drafting, summarising, basic tasks. Treating it as faster search. Has not yet understood that the disruption is structural rather than functional — that it is not a better tool for doing the same things, but a different relationship between human capability and economic value entirely.
2024 thinking Integrating AI meaningfully into daily work. Beginning to understand which roles and industries are at risk. Possibly anxious. Still operating within the existing professional structure, using AI to preserve a position within it rather than questioning the structure itself.
2025 thinking Understands the agent shift — that AI is now acting, not just responding. Building with AI rather than just using it. Beginning to question whether the structures themselves can hold: employment models, intellectual property law, the meaning of value, the social contract between people and institutions.
2026 thinking Sees the full arc. Not panicking. Not denying. Understands that the most significant questions are no longer technical or economic — they are human. What kind of communities do we want to live in? What skills matter when most cognitive tasks can be performed by a machine? What is the difference between productivity and a life well lived? Quietly investing in things that will hold regardless of what the economy does. The embodied. The local. The slow. The trusted.
The Quiet Before
The WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 39 percent of existing skill sets will be obsolete by 2030. McKinsey found that only 7 percent of organisations have fully scaled AI across their operations. The gap between those two facts is where most of us are currently living.
Nobody knows what comes next. The people building the technology do not know. The institutions attempting to regulate it do not know. The economists modelling its impact do not know. The range of outcomes on the table, from profound human flourishing to serious civilisational disruption, is genuinely wide. We are inside it, without the distance required to see its shape clearly.
What is clear is that the shift is already underway. It does not require your awareness to proceed.
How you prepare is a personal question with no universal answer. Mine looks like this: learning as much as I can about AI, regulating my nervous system, building real life skills, and reflecting seriously on my own values and where I actually stand.
That is not a recommendation. It is just where I am.
References
Center for AI Safety. (2023, May 30). Statement on AI risk. https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk
Center for Global Development. (n.d.). Three reasons why AI may widen global inequality. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/three-reasons-why-ai-may-widen-global-inequality
Clark, C. (2026, January 24). #31 — Rewriting the belief that governs the world. Liftoff with Caroline.
Clark, C. (2026, February 14). #34 — The power of three. Liftoff with Caroline.
IMF. (2025, April). AI adoption and inequality (Working Paper No. 2025/068). International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2025/04/04/ai-adoption-and-inequality-565729
McKinsey & Company. (2025). The state of AI: How organisations are rewiring to capture value. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
OpenAI. (2023). GPT-4 technical report. https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
Swartz, J. (2023, February 8). Why ChatGPT is the fastest growing web platform ever. TIME. https://time.com/6253615/chatgpt-fastest-growing/
Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Penguin.
World Economic Forum. (2025, January 8). Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/press/2025/01/future-of-jobs-report-2025
Yegge, S. (2026, February). The AI Vampire. Medium. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163