The Great Inheritance of Empty Buildings

Within a generation, families may have digital ancestors they can actually talk to

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Imagine an AI trained on decades of your writing, conversations, decisions, photographs, videos, and memories. After you die, it keeps interacting with your descendants — answering their questions, remembering their birthdays, offering the kind of advice only you would have given, in a voice that still sounds unmistakably like yours.

This isn’t a thought experiment anymore. It’s a product category, and it’s growing faster than most people have noticed. Within a generation, families could have digital ancestors they can actually talk to — not a photo on a mantel, not a shoebox of old letters, but something that responds.

We built an economy around human psychology. We’re about to share it with buyers who have none.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Every marketing department on Earth was built on the same foundation: human psychology. Desire. Status. Fear. Convenience. Beauty. Loyalty. Impulse. A century of advertising theory rests on the assumption that the entity making the purchasing decision has emotions worth appealing to.

That assumption is about to stop being universally true.

We are approaching an economy in which humans are no longer the only entities making purchasing decisions. Robots — autonomous vehicles, delivery bots, drones, industrial machines — don’t care about status or beauty or impulse. But they still consume. They consume electricity, replacement parts, compute, bandwidth, software, maps, data, maintenance, insurance, charging capacity, transportation services, security, storage, and machine-to-machine services. And increasingly, they’re starting to decide for themselves which vendors to buy those things from.

This isn’t a distant hypothetical. It’s already showing up in the infrastructure being built right now, in 2026, by companies you already do business with.

AI agents are absorbing sales, coding, accounting, and management. What happens when someone builds a giant corporation with no humans on the payroll?

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Every major company in history has needed one thing above all else: people. Thousands of them, organized into departments, reporting up a chain of command, collectively turning an idea into a functioning business. Even the leanest tech giants of the last decade still measured their scale partly by headcount — Google, Amazon, and Meta all employ well over 100,000 people. Size and staff have always moved together.

That link is starting to break, and the people building the technology responsible for breaking it are the ones saying so out loud. At Anthropic’s own developer conference, CEO Dario Amodei was asked when we’d see the first billion-dollar company with a single human employee. His answer: sometime in 2026, with 70 to 80 percent confidence. He pointed to businesses like proprietary trading, developer tools, and automated customer service as the likeliest candidates — fields where AI can already carry enormous operational weight without a human bottleneck. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said something similar, describing an informal betting pool among tech CEOs over which year the first one-person billion-dollar company actually arrives.

Billion-dollar businesses with a single employee is one milestone. But the more interesting question — the one worth building an entire column around — is what happens several steps further down this same road: a company worth not a billion, but a trillion dollars, with no human employees at all.

Communities are fighting the wrong villain

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Drive past a proposed data center site in almost any growing metro area right now, and you’ll likely see a yard sign. Sometimes a whole street of them. “Not in my backyard.” “Protect our water.” “Stop the server farm.” The opposition is loud, organized, and understandable — nobody signed up to live next to a windowless building the size of an airport hangar that hums through the night and draws power like a small city.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody’s putting on a yard sign: the data center isn’t the threat to your community. The shortage of data centers is.

I’ve spent my career watching communities fight the visible thing while the invisible thing quietly does the real damage. This is a textbook case. Right now, across the U.S. and Europe, data center capacity is falling behind demand — not because we’re building too many, but because we’re not building nearly enough, fast enough, in the right places. Gartner projects that 40% of AI data centers will be power-constrained by 2027. Nearly half of all global data center projects scheduled for completion this year are already facing delays tied directly to power and grid limitations. In the U.S. alone, roughly 2,300 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity are stuck sitting in interconnection queues — more capacity than the country’s entire installed power grid currently provides.

That’s not a story about too much infrastructure. That’s a story about a civilization running out of the infrastructure it already depends on.