Whether you realize it or not, you are living through the beginning of a new era of history. It used to be said that we were living in the “information age” with the birth of the internet. Now that ChatGPT and the other types of artificial intelligence have been released, I think that it’s safe to say that the information age has transitioned into the AI age.
What comes next with all this? AI is about to change the world and it’s not necessarily for the better.
Here are a few of my thoughts.
“Super” AI will keep getting smarter
I differentiate this from the concept of superintelligence. When I say “Super AI” what I mean is that you’re going to see a host of different AI abilities being combined. Picture what you would have if you combined ChatGPT, Midjourney, Grammarly, financial guru AI, facial recognition, “counseling AI,” and so on other types of AIs together, and think about what you would have. What’s more, AI learns and adapts incredibly quickly – far more quickly than humans are capable of learning.
It would be something reminiscent of Jarvis from Iron Man. You would end up with this AI that was very much something of a genie in a bottle. Just about anything you would want that AI to do (that didn’t necessarily need to be done in the real world), that AI could do.
Want to talk with somebody about how your day went, what you’re thinking, the advice you need, or how you want to make money trading stocks? A “super AI” would be able to do it and more. This would be somewhat akin to the movie Her. You have this very smart AI that is just about as capable as a human. AI could easily begin to replace human relationships because AI understands you.
As far as superintelligence goes, I think we may have a bit of time there yet. The very idea of superintelligence is somewhat difficult to come to terms with, but Nick Bostrom’s book on the subject (Superintelligence) and The Singularity Is Near are both books that I think will help you to understand the concept better.
“Soldier” AIs in the military
You’re most certainly going to see AI be something of an arms race amongst nations. People are going to do everything they can to figure out how they can weaponize this so that it can be used to protect their people and attack others.
Initially, this will probably be used for cyberwarfare in the form of hacking and coding new viruses that, like Stuxnet, will be capable of causing damage to actual hardware. You’ll also see it used for “financial warfare.” AI is incredibly good at pattern recognition. It will be used to create AIs that are used to manipulate financial markets to cause economic damage to enemy nations or people groups. It could quite literally be used to cause a financial depression in a targeted nation and could even be set up so that it only impacts that nation (or at least predominantly that nation). That AI would be able to understand what stocks and companies a nation needs most, and then go after those.
But it won’t just be in the cyber realm. You’re going to see wild advancements in AI and robotics as well. We’re already seeing ChatGPT being put into robot dogs. This is literally just the beginning. If you’ll remember back in 2020, there was widespread use of AI, drones, and temperature-reading cameras to gather information and enforce mandates. What comes next with AI is that on steroids.
Do I think you’ll see autonomous robotics that are fully capable of making their own decisions and acting of their own volition? Not really. What I think you’ll see instead are robots that have been programmed by police and military units to accomplish X goal without needing human oversight and those robots will go out and accomplish that goal. There are going to be a lot of hurdles in the initial stages of this, but Elysium-style police robots are truly not that far off of an idea within the next 20 years (if not sooner).
The death of a myriad of jobs
We’re already seeing widespread job impact as a direct result of companies replacing human beings with AI. Exhibit A here would be IBM. They’re even geared up to replace their human resources department with AI.
Think back towards the creation of the loom or just about any other technological tool throughout history. They cause job loss. Read up on the history of the Luddites to see what I mean here. Much like Gutenberg put scribes out of business, the introduction of next-level AI into the world is very much going to do the same thing to people across the globe. There will be new jobs that are created out of the birth of this technology (if we’re using history as a guide), but a lot of things are going to change.
Personally, I think manual labor is one of the safest options at the moment due to robotic technology and price-point not being at the level it would need to be to cause plumbers, electricians, and carpenters to be out of a job. If you do just about anything with computers, I think that you do have cause for concern. (Once upon a time, I thought that comedians would be one of the only people safe from robots stealing their jobs. Considering that AI has already done a pretty good job making jokes of its own accord now though, I don’t think this anymore.) If you are worried about AI taking your job, check out this article.
AI is going to change the world.
I don’t think that the above is an exhaustive list of the ways in which you’re going to see changes in the near future, but I do think that it’s a good place to start. As time progresses, keep your ear to the road, and I think that you’ll find that you’re going to see quite a bit of the above. Most of it is not good for humanity.
What are some of your thoughts here, however? Do you think there are going to be other areas that are impacted? Do you think I’m off base with the above? Are you concerned about the rise of AI? Either way, let us know in the comment section.
About Aden
Aden Tate is a regular contributor to TheOrganicPrepper.com and TheFrugalite.com. Aden runs a micro-farm where he raises dairy goats, a pig, honeybees, meat chickens, laying chickens, tomatoes, mushrooms, and greens. Aden has four published books, What School Should Have Taught You, The Faithful Prepper, An Arm and a Leg, The Prepper’s Guide to Post-Disaster Communications, and Zombie Choices. You can find his podcast The Last American on Preppers’ Broadcasting Network.
Article cross-poste from The Organic Prepper.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.