GPU world

Imagine you’re a salesperson in 2040. You live alone in an apartment, in a big city. You wake up at 11 am, drink orange juice and then look out of the window. You realize you’ve got plants on your windowsill that need watering. You notice the crowded intersection through your window. People are always going somewhere and you wonder why. Then you open your laptop and check the news from your AI agents. You scroll through a gigantic wall of text of possible sales opportunities. You pick a few options and decide to schedule calls with potential buyers. You open an app for humans only and verify you’re human through an eye-scan, then put the names of the potential buyers into the app and see if any of them have a free slot in their calendars for a call. One of them has a free slot two hours from now so you select that and start preparing for the call. You have tons of information to swallow, prepared by your swarm of agents. That is the starting point of your negotiation planning.

Sounds boring? Back in 2026,when the AI revolution was just beginning, people thought the world would change forever. But honestly, I don’t think it has changed at all.

The call never happened. I had waited twenty minutes and the guy hadn’t shown up. I felt a bit frustrated about wasted time so I decided to go to the park. It was a sunny autumn day, so I put on my leather jacket and headed outside. I stopped by one of the vending machines scattered across every street corner and ordered a nootropic-enhanced coffee. It suppresses the usual caffeine-induced anxiety while providing an extra dose of essential minerals. Drinks from these machines are pretty affordable, as the entire supply chain is fully automated. Small delivery bots keep them stocked with fresh products, and you rarely come across a broken one, since their continuous remote diagnostics can detect problems ahead of time or instantly. Interestingly, the machine I usually use was broken this time. I went to another street and tried my chances with another machine. That one worked, and I continued my walk toward the park. I took a sip and immediately spat it out. It was awful. Actually, it wasn’t coffee at all. I gave up on the coffee and headed towards the nearest autonomous shuttle stop. I selected destination on a mobile app, the nearest park, and a bus was already waiting for me, when I arrived.

The app showed there’s huge traffic at the moment and I had twenty minutes of drive, so I put on my VR goggles. I asked my cyber assistant for news from the company I work for, which specializes in measurement equipment for highly specialized applications. It’s a tiny company, just having a dozen talented engineers, who somehow can compete with corpos. I think the only reason such a small company can exist is because corpos follow money too much. Some customers are fed up with expensive equipment, that barely works, so I target those people and I show them that the quality and tailored features still are available for a fair price.

A pleasant chime sounded, letting me know we’d reached our destination.

But it wasn’t the park.

I clambered out of the shuttle and stepped onto one of the fanciest streets in the city. Corpos headquaters, private banks and prestigious law firms all lined both sides of this long road. There was a square with a few trees though, which you can interpret as a park, if you are drunk.

Resigned by a set of failures of this day I decided to go there. By this point, if I ordered a new ride I would expect ending up on a scrapyard.

Among these few trees there was a small fountain and four marble benches. I sat on one and took a deep breath. I observed how single leaves are falling with a subtle wind. After a few minutes my slowly returning chill was distrubed by a furious shouting guy. He wore one of those expensive suits which I wouldn’t buy even for my own wedding. What seemed like a conversation turned out to be just swearing into the air. Then he noticed me, and immediately rushed into my direction.

“Hey, you! Do you have a VR headset?”

As an introvert I am shocked every time a random stranger speaks to me, so I said nothing.

“Mine just stopped working. I got a pop up, that a very important security update needs to be installed, and after that I can’t use any of my devices. And I have very important call in a few minutes”.

I handed him my headset and entered the code shown to me on my phone to connect to the call. The guy turned around and started speaking in typical corporate jargon. A transcript of his conversation suddenly appeared on my phone, and I just looked at it. Several people were discussing a failures of some devices critical to monitoring atomic power plants. The existing devices monitoring temperature and vibrations did their work only partially. Fixed replacements couldn’t be delivered in reasonable time, because the vendor of these have their production scheduled up for next year. And the power plant couldn’t be stopped, because that would discrupt nearby data centers and factories. It looked like they’d rather risk a catasthrophy than shutting down one of those power plants.

The guy finished the call after about fifteen minutes and returned my VR headset.

“Do you need some specialized measurement instruments?” I asked him.

“Maybe. Why?”

“I cought a bit of your conversation and I just sell those. We have even some on stock right know. I could send your engineers a demo for a week, and you can buy more, if you are interested.”

I’m not sure if they guy look confused or surprised. He appeared like a person who does every decision in a second, and now he needed to think for five.

“OK, send me it. Here’s a contact to one of my guys.”

Then he just left without saying goodbye.

I sat there for a while just thinking, when I noticed I’m had been watched from a distance. A guy in a black hoodie with his hands buried down in his pockets was standing on the other side of the square. When our eyes met, he immediately looked away and hurried off.