ctrlAIOther Tomorrows
2026Fiction

You were born in 2026. I promised to write you a letter every birthday, in my own words.

What’s real here, and what’s imagined Open

This story is fiction. The lines marked in it lean on the real world, and here is where each one stands. When reality catches up with a line, it moves to “Real already,” with the date. Checked September 24, 2026.

Real already

Real
Countries race to build the next AI first.

Governments already use the word. In July 2025, the White House published “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” with more than 90 federal actions to keep the US ahead.

Real
Machines find cancer earlier.

In a randomized trial of more than 100,000 women in Sweden, AI-supported mammography found more cancers at screening and led to 12% fewer cancers being diagnosed between screenings, with similar false-positive rates.

Real
Machines write more of what we read, and write it well.

By one estimate, about half of new English-language articles on the web in early 2026 were mostly written by AI. The study didn’t count human-edited AI drafts, which may be more common still.

Real
People stop saying what they think when they feel watched.

After the 2013 revelations about mass surveillance, views of Wikipedia articles on terrorism-related topics fell by about 20% and stayed lower, a 2016 study found. People changed what they looked up.

Not yet

Not yet
The machines change everything within one childhood.

In a 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, the combined forecast gave a 10% chance that machines outdo people at every task by 2027, and 50% by 2047, thirteen years sooner than the same survey a year earlier.

Not yet
The world stops needing people to decide.

Researchers call this gradual disempowerment: no takeover, just people slowly losing their hold on the economy, culture and government as AI does more of the work. It is a warning, not a forecast.

Not yet
One winner keeps the most powerful AI.

No single winner yet, but the machinery is concentrated: by Epoch AI’s estimate, five companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle) held about 71% of the world’s AI computing power at the end of 2025.

Not yet
Most countries agree to slow AI down.

In 2023, more than 33,000 people signed an open letter asking for a six-month pause on the biggest AI experiments; no pause followed. In 2024, the Council of Europe opened the first legally binding international AI treaty for signature. It sets rules, not a pause.

Nobody knows yet

  • Which of these years we are living in now.
  • Whether any world gets the cures without paying for them with its voice.
  • What she will write back.

Other Tomorrows is published by Ctrl AI at ctrlai.com.