{"slug": "brain-economy-will-come-next-after-the-internet-economy", "title": "Brain Economy Will Come Next After the Internet Economy", "summary": "The next economic era after the internet economy will be the brain economy, driven by AGI and direct brain-computer interfaces that deliver constant happiness and eliminate mental disorders, according to a futurist analysis. This shift will make knowledge synthesis a commodity, end traditional STEM PhDs, and transform warfare into a VR game as human-to-human conflict disappears.", "body_md": "Future is one of the most exciting matters in the life of a human being. Think twenty years ago, could you imagine the world would be like it is today?\n\nTwenty years ago. I was eight, wondering why for the same piece of money I can buy one chocolate in the UK but three chocolates in Russia. Back then, in my life no PCs, no computer games, no smartphones, no internet. It’s even pre-2008 when both Lehman Brothers and Bitcoin signed the year and taught me something about this world. Could I imagine AI, all the internet economy, cryptocurrencies, wars, sensors, etc? No. Did they already exist in the wild? Yes they did.\n\nToday I want to think about what will become an absolutely normal part of our life in twenty years, that already exists but is hard for our minds to grasp.\n\nWe will get all materials the world has been working on for the last hundred years in mere years because of the AGI research acceleration.\n\nRoom-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductors – lossless global power grid.\n\nBulk carbyne – ultra-thin, ultra-strong molecular cables: lighter-than-anything structural fibres for robotics, aerospace, and space tethers.\n\nAtomically precise diamondoid materials – chips with perfect heat channels, medical devices that operate inside the body, ultra-hard mechanical parts, perfect filters, tiny machines, and catalysts designed atom-by-atom.\n\nPractical optical metamaterials – superlenses that see below the normal optical limit, perfect antennas, ultra-thin cameras, adaptive camouflage, light-routing chips, and AR glasses/contact lenses that look like normal glass.\n\nBiological-level self-healing structural materials – aircraft, buildings, spacecraft, pipelines, and bridges that detect cracks and repair themselves before failure\n\nLiterally you name it. Knowledge synthesis is a commodity, science is almost dead, scientists are depressed, no one is doing STEM PhDs anymore.\n\nHumans are now the blend of their bio brain and AI integrated on top through non-invasive devices. No personal devices, no social media, no intermediaries in brain stimulation are needed anymore, the brain is being stimulated directly producing happy hormones whenever human happiness goes down. This is a commodity, like an iphone with TikTok today, everyone on the Earth can afford it, no matter where no matter what their economic situation is. Everyone is permanently happy.\n\nWhile having AGI directly integrated into the brain, the vast majority is not using it for anything except for casual functionality and pleasure manufacturing. It’s just a new form-factor for the job iPhone is doing today: directly delivered into the body chemistry. Apps will be directly installed into the brain and activate proper areas at particular times.\n\nAs a consequence of this, there will be a new huge industry of body maintenance machines and devices as well as health brain apps. For example a brain app that takes you for a run three times per week and it feels like you really love doing it and enjoy it so much.\n\nThe war game goes up with the material upgrade and machine advancement; it spikes up till the moment there is no single human on the battlefield and it turns into an expensive VR game. But the wins over machines doesn’t bring true satisfaction, so the sophisticated attacks on humans continue. Kidnapping, blowing up, whatever can make it to the media cover and viral TikTok continues drawing attention. However, most of the incidents are faked to make some media noise.\n\nThe battlefields and defense industry will be bubbling wildly the next ten years but then it all will be gone completely as human to human interface will be gone completely.\n\nBecause of direct brain interfaces the depression is gone, and all disorders affiliated with brain functioning in one way and not in another way are gone. At the same time, because the brain operating under brain apps is now a self-sufficient self-satisfying always happy mechanism, people are not really engaging into any social activities, not making friends, starting relations or families, do not hug, kiss or even have sex, not even going to Burning Man. More than this: people do not have pets anymore. All of that is simulated by brain apps.\n\nWe can read a genome and understand exactly what every part does, how it produces a whole living organism, and how to modify it to change or fix particular things in a human being. It is a commodity like a blood test today, but highly regulated in terms of what one can request to change. First, there is a black market for DNA modifications and legal measures for those violating the rules. But then everyone’s DNA is monitored with a nano-device and any illegal changes are just impossible by design. Zero-trust by design they call it :D\n\nNew sources of energy made datacenters as rudimentary as huge computers taking the whole room.\n\nAGI happened through models accounting for physical reality feedback. No one remembers what LLM was. There are no agents and no chats. It’s gone as ICQ is gone today.\n\nThe world is fully driven through direct brain interfaces. Models are integrated into brains in a casual way like today we have the internet around powering different devices and services, AGI will be powering different brain apps.\n\nNo agentic economy, AGI is not trying to take over the world, to kidnap all energy sources, or to optimize the world. Humans are still sometimes prompting it (with a thought) and some processes are running autonomously. AGI is running research labs and all professions dealing with processing a lot of information. Humans are chilling in the background. We still can create art, be philosophers or grow flowers. But no one is interested in consuming it.\n\nWhile we were going from the internet economy to the brain economy, the power landscape changed drastically. Now the richest, most powerful people are those who built empires of brain apps, body maintenance, and brain infrastructure. They have very few employees, so all the wealth and power are in hands of dozens this time, not dozens of thousands as it is now. While on one side everything became really cheap and people need less money by default to have a joyful life, it became incredibly hard to find a useful occupation and to contribute to this new brain economy in a meaningful way. Most people take seasonal gigs which are more like a nominal project helping people not to die because of literally no resources at all.\n\nThere is no universal income. Governments are not supporting people as they do not know how to survive themselves against the new power of brain economy enterprise. World bribery level is absolutely unprecedented.\n\nWhile there is some encryption in the brain to brain communication it is as reliable as the internet privacy we have today. Everything is being collected and processed by the enterprise and used to optimize the pleasure algorithms of brain apps. People can’t lie to governments or enterprise anymore as they query brains directly.\n\nOpenAI, Anthropic and all frontier labs died with LLMs. A new generation of models came from different people and different labs. Sam Altman didn’t get the worldpower. Sequoia is heavily invested in the brain economy and is the last user of twitter.\n\nSpace economy – there is almost zero space economy. People are not willing neither to travel nor to reallocate to space. There was a splash when it looked like they were willing to, but the pool of humans interested in terrestrial explorations ended up being extremely limited. A human is a simple and sentimental creature willing to be close to friends and family and being satisfied with simple pleasures.\n\n100+ years longevity – we have all the components, but this is an expensive pleasure (not a commodity) and we do not have strong stimulus to earn money so it is like pension in the modern world: we postpone it as much as possible because it feels like we still have time, and when time comes we do not have much. At the same time, because humans interface with the world directly through brain stimulation, the only reason to live longer is to prolong the joyful brain stimulation. Some people take loans to buy some more days before they die but the data system is so transparent that almost no one can get any loans as they know they won’t be able to pay them back.\n\nHumanoids everywhere – there will be a lot, like robots vacuum cleaners, but it still will be a niche product. Most people on the Earth are not fans of scifi. While adopting smartphones solves some really functional problems, my bet is that they were adopted widely at that scale (screen time) mostly because of its entertainment part. As the positive hormone injection will switch directly to the brain interface – humanoids will be a purely functional machine like your nokia 20 years ago. Unless they also have a function of sex machine and will substitute porno websites and chats today.\n\n**The main thing that didn’t change – humans. In twenty years, we are still driven by ego, desire to possess and being recognized as alpha. Most of it is not happening directly on human brains, so no mansions or sportcars needed. It was never about being ‘the one’, it was just about feeling ‘the one’, now everyone can feel it. And everyone believes it’s only them who feels it. **\n\nAs people do not have a need to start families and have kids, this can easily be the end of human civilization. The only way how it won’t is if those powerful enterprise or governments continue to artificially bride humans and grow new humans. Which theoretically might make sense as they need new consumers, but at the same time, there is not too much to do for humans on the Earth anymore. So even if they manufacture some humans, the total amount of humans will probably be declining, even considering that the life has become longer.\n\nFirst the core mass of humans will be gone, the only still there will be those controlling most resources and people around them. By that moment, all the countries and geopolitics will be regrouped, they just won’t need that many countries. And then there will be some really silly ending. Probably a war, because superpowers always desire extensions, but a casual war. Not a machine powered brain interfaced one. An old school, maybe a one to one duel. Where two most powerful people will shoot each other, and then everyone else will be slowly gone.\n\n~~~\n\nIt doesn’t sound very romantic, I know. No spirituality renaissance or enlightenment. But at the end of the day, we are just prettily constructed biomachines.\n\n*With love from the future, a prettily constructed biomachine number 75398403922-29433*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/brain-economy-will-come-next-after-the-internet-economy", "canonical_source": "https://paragraph.com/@lisaakselrod/my-thesis-about-the-future-tl%3Bdr-this-is-the-end", "published_at": "2026-07-16 13:10:48+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-16 13:25:16.297670+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-agents", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["AGI", "iPhone", "TikTok", "Lehman Brothers", "Bitcoin"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/brain-economy-will-come-next-after-the-internet-economy", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/brain-economy-will-come-next-after-the-internet-economy.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/brain-economy-will-come-next-after-the-internet-economy.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/brain-economy-will-come-next-after-the-internet-economy.jsonld"}}