Companion robots are already in Australian aged care and the national AI plan names them. Monitoring supports care. Companionship substitutes for it.
We automated entry-level work and eliminated middle management in the same window. In doing so, we deleted the corporate classroom and the teacher. Here’s what arrives next, and why the organisations that feel most efficient right now may be the least prepared for 2029.
In 2016, at a keynote in Perth, I said the real question was never the technology. It was outputs, not inputs. Ten years later, the researchers building the world’s most powerful AI just confirmed it, in a letter to their own governments.
When the past runs the room and the future feels threatening, organisations cannot learn or prepare. PTFA names the pattern, and that is how you begin to move through it.
The measure of a good future is not whether it is efficient or technologically impressive. It is whether the people living inside it can trust it, navigate it, and retain their dignity.
Most futures thinking tells you what might happen. Immediate Futures tells you what is already happening, and what you can do about it now, before the window closes.
