Do you remember the last time you felt the magic? When you encountered something truly novel, something that was both surprising and at the same time deeply familiar, because you had imagined such a thing, but until that very moment, believed it impossible?
I’ve had only a handful of such moments in my long relationship with digital technology. The first was in 1981, when I programmed a game of tic-tac-toe on an underpowered IBM PC. I compiled the crude lines of code I’d been assigned to write, issued the command “RUN” at the C: prompt, and damned if the thing didn’t actually work.
For me, that was the beginning of the PC revolution.
The second time was a few years later when I got my hands on a first edition Macintosh. A friend in college loaned it to me because I was debugging software for the new platform and needed a machine for testing (no way could I afford such a luxury on my scholarship stipend). I booted the odd-looking machine and cupped my palm over a mouse for the very first time. When the cursor moved on the screen in concert with my hand, my imagination lit up. Holy hell, I thought, this is going to change everything.
For me, the Mac marked the beginning of a user interface revolution.
The next magical moment involved stumbling into early online communities in the late 1980s. Someone at work (I covered Apple for a trade magazine) heard that I was a Grateful Dead fan and told me about The WELL, founded by a few lunatics I’d later get to know when we started Wired (Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, and later Kevin Kelly). I got the software, set up an account, and holy shit, in ten minutes I was lurking on message boards that included some of the most interesting minds in tech. It was like someone let me into a club I had no business joining, but I was hooked.
For me, that was the beginning of the network revolution.
Five years later, in 1993, I recall sitting in front of newly installed version of NCSA Mosaic, an experimental browser freely available via FTP sites on the internet. I typed in the “web address” of a site a colleague at Wired told me about, and the old tech magic took hold of me once again. I must have spent the next five hours “surfing the web,” jumping from link to link, amazed and insanely excited about what all this meant.
For me, that was the beginning of the Web revolution.
Then came search – the very first time I used Google, in 1998, I sensed everything was about to change once again. This, I realized, was the beginning of an information revolution.
I could go on and on with examples of tech magic from decades ago – the special effects in Jurassic Park and Toy Story, the first blogging platforms, the first iPhone, early social networks, the first time an Uber showed up at my door. But the magic pretty much ended after that – Uber launched in 2009, and the toxic brew of smartphones, app stores, social media, and extractive capitalism that followed buried tech’s magical qualities in a cacophonous mix of profit seeking and peacockery.
But recently, as I struggled with a daunting task that involved managing an Excel spreadsheet with more than a thousand rows of information, the magic returned. I wanted to “enrich” a column of data with URLs from the web, but if I were to do it manually, it would have taken days. I knew what I wanted to accomplish was, in theory, possible using a custom search engine, a few APIs, and some complicated scripting in a language I’d never mastered. Or, I could have paid a company or a consultant to do it for me, but that would have cost hundreds, if not thousands, taken weeks to complete, and the quality would have been iffy at best.
I’ve been using AI chatbots ever since they launched, and I’d read about Claude’s capabilities with scripts and coding. I’d always wanted to check out this “vibe coding” thing, but until last night, I’d not had a good enough reason to put it to the test. And while what I accomplished wasn’t really “vibe coding” per se, for me, it felt like magic. Claude walked me through five concise, easily implemented steps and within minutes, I was watching new, highly accurate data populate my sheet in real time.
What once was unthinkable due to time, knowledge, and/or cost constraints was now something I could do on a whim. And there it was again – the elation of realizing everything was about to change.
For me, that marked the beginning of an economic and social revolution.
This is a very, very long way of getting to prediction #3 for 2026: This will be the year that AI moves beyond chatbots and into the fabric of everyday life in ways that will surprise and delight hundreds of millions of people, changing what they thought they could accomplish and reordering economic productivity along the way. That in turn will drive tectonic shifts in the business models underpinning most companies reliant on digital technology. There will be lots of magic this year. But there will also be plenty of carnage as previously unbreachable moats start to crumble, not only in business, but also in society at large. For more on that, stay tuned for prediction #2.
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This is the seventh in a series of post I’ll be doing on predictions for 2026. The first six are here, here, here, here, here and here. When I get to #1, I’ll post a roundup like I usually do.