By wave
A box's wave is the length of its longest chain of hard prerequisites. Waves show build order, not dates. Every box needs only boxes from earlier waves.
Wave 1 21
- China critical-mineral export controls
- US ban on foreign-made robots and drones
- Algorithmic efficiency
- Chip and memory supply
- Context engineering
- Datacentre capex
- Export controls
- Firm power deals
- Memory bandwidth and supply
- Power and grid buildout
- Precision robot actuators
- Rare-earth permanent magnet supply
- Real-world task evals
- Reliable verifiers
- Stablecoin payment rails
- Synthetic data
- Teleoperation as a data pipeline
- Tool use and code execution
- Training data supply
- Workflow redesign
- Capital concentrated in AI
Wave 2 10
Wave 3 9
Wave 4 10
Wave 5 18
- Sycophancy
- AI research tools in investing
- Image generation
- On-device models
- Perturbation data at scale
- Voice cloning and real-time speech
- World models and simulation
- AI answers replace search
- AI companions
- AI in public services
- AI tutoring at scale
- AI writes most new code
- Embodied agents
- Frontier lab revenue
- Low-price AI for emerging markets
- Military AI and autonomy
- Reasoning models
- Robotaxis at scale
Wave 6 24
- AI-enabled persuasion
- Capex payback gap
- Narrowing of scientific inquiry
- Opaque reasoning
- Agent identity and permissions
- AI cyber defence
- Ambient documentation beyond medicine
- Clinical AI in practice
- Contamination-resistant evals
- Data rights and licensing
- Firm-owned post-trained models
- Likeness and performer rights
- Persistent memory
- Reliability on repeat
- Robust generalisation
- Shared ontology and wiki
- Skills
- Video generation with sound
- Virtual cell models
- Weight-level continual learning
- Ambient AI wearables
- Home robots
- Long-horizon agents
- Self-replicating robot factories
Wave 7 22
- Attention and curation under content glut
- Misbehaviour cascades in agent swarms
- Agent payments
- AI-run cyber operations
- Chip tracking and location verification
- Code review at scale
- Content provenance
- Correction propagation
- Financial regulators testing AI
- International coordination
- Model weight security
- Regulation
- Sovereign compute
- Trace capture
- AGI: top-expert-level AI
- AI-native medicine
- Always-on background agents
- Coding agents as products
- Knowledge-rich agents
- Licensed generative media
- Offshore services displacement
- Synthetic media at scale
Wave 8 26
- Deskilling from AI use
- Public AI scepticism
- Agents that trade for investors
- AGI declared
- AI R&D uplift
- AI-generated trading signals
- AI-native application revenue
- Audit and attribution
- Compute deterrence
- Computer use
- Disclosure and labelling
- Expertise pipeline
- Frontier research talent
- Interpretability
- Paying the people who make knowledge
- Prompt-injection resistance
- Protection against AI herding
- Tests models cannot game
- Verification of AI agreements
- AI-native entertainment
- Automated coder
- Continual-learning agents
- Firms shrink to a few operators
- Government AGI project
- Professional-services agents
- Software that maintains itself
Wave 9 24
- AI as an electoral issue
- Agent-to-agent protocols
- AI in research mathematics
- AI R&D capability evals
- Biosecurity safeguards
- Experimental validation capacity
- Healthy information ecosystem
- Institutions for agent societies
- Legitimate governance
- Liability and insurance
- Measured productivity gains
- Multi-agent coordination
- Output verification at scale
- Permeability controls
- Proof of personhood
- Purpose beyond paid work
- Reputation and credentials
- Rollback
- Scalable oversight
- Agent-native organisations
- AI-run capital allocation
- Drop-in remote worker
- Superhuman AI researcher
- Verified slowdown
Wave 10 15
- AI-enabled power concentration
- Alignment
- Divergent-copy reconciliation
- Human influence preserved
- Intent interfaces
- Internal deployment oversight
- Long-horizon value stability
- Model welfare and moral status
- Agent economies
- Agent-run discovery
- Agents designing agents
- Civilisation-scale knowledge
- Explosive economic growth
- Intelligence explosion
- Superintelligence