"Today's AI is tomorrow’s dial-up!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
There’s a phrase I like to use: “Today will involve the slowest rate of change for the rest of your life!”
That concept seems quaint in the era of fast-moving AI. In fact, we should rephrase it: “By the time you finish reading this sentence, the state-of-the-art has already moved on.”
Think back to 2024. We were impressed by a chatbot that could summarize a PDF. For those of us of a technical bent, we thought a 128k ‘context window’ was a “breakthrough.” In retrospect, that was the screeching, static-filled noise of the 56k modem era. We were in the AOL-era of AI!
Today? Welcome to the broadband era of intelligence.
In just the last 24 months, the landscape hasn’t just shifted. It’s undergone a seismic shift. The ground we knew below our feet has been pulverized and rebuilt. Think about just a few of the AI trends as we go into this new era:
The Memory Explosion: We’ve graduated from "summarizing a document" to "uploading the entire library." Leading models like Gemini now process millions of tokens at once, compared to the 128k context windows we were celebrating as breakthroughs just 18 months ago. We aren't just prompting; we’re giving AI an entire War & Peace document set to churn through.
The Price Collapse: Intelligence is now a commodity utility. The cost to run GPT-4-class reasoning has plummeted by 98%. What cost $60 is now essentially "too cheap to meter" at less than $0.75.
From "Chatting" to "Doing": 2024 was about talking to a screen. 2026 is about Agentic AI. We're moving past chatbots to autonomous agents that negotiate, navigate CRMs, and execute project workflows without being babysat.
The last few weeks have had me working with Claude Cowork and Claude Copilot, and my entire concept of AI has changed. I don’t just ask it questions — I now instruct it to go off and do the work on my behalf. That’s a subtle but important change, and once you wrap your head around what that change brings, your head explodes.
And I haven't even yet jumped into the world of Claw! It's on the list!
It is evident that not only is the power and capability of AI accelerating, but we are rapidly building a new operating system around it. If you are still "playing around" with prompts, you’re still waiting for the handshake signal on a dial-up connection. You're stuck with a modem connection when the rest of the world has installed fiber.
The bandwidth of possibility has expanded. The question isn't whether the tech is ready. The question is: Are you ready for the speed of the "Broadband" era, or are you still waiting for the page to load?
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Futurist Jim Carroll started his online experience with a 300-baud modem in 1982. Think about that.
**#AI** **#DialUp** **#Broadband** **#Acceleration** **#Technology** **#Future** **#Change** **#Innovation** **#Agents** **#Claude** **#Speed**
Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/03/decoding-tomorrow-daily-inspiration-the-acceleration-of-ai-todays-ai-is-tomorrows-dial-up/
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Futurist Jim Carroll
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