• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, February 7, 2025

There’s an asteroid, just six years away, worth a hundred quintillion dollars.

It’s called 16 Psyche. A little over a year ago, NASA launched a mission to it. We’ll reach it in 2029. And it’s not far-fetched to think about us mining it, and other asteroids, in the near future.

A hundred quintillion dollars breaks everything. It’s literally a million times the entire GDP of planet earth. We have no idea how to think about it.

So let’s think about a different number: $20 trillion.

It’s much more manageable. US GDP is just over $27 trillion. The GDP of China is just under $18 trillion. These are numbers that exist in the world. Economists can wrap their heads around them.

$20 trillion is what IDC says AI will contribute to the global economy through 2030.

That’s like adding another China to the global economy -- within six years.

$20 trillion might seem like a manageable number, but that would be an illusion. Here’s why: if AI is effective enough to drive a $20 trillion contribution to the global economy, it’s effective enough that everything gets thrown up in the air.

Take healthcare.

If AI is effective enough to drive a $20 trillion contribution to the global economy, it won’t just be good enough to eliminate almost all the time doctors spend on paperwork. It will also be good enough to serve as a doctor.

Or take higher education. (Set aside for the moment education’s not insubstantial value as a transition to independent adulthood.)

If AI is effective enough to drive a $20 trillion contribution to the global economy, it won’t just be good enough to help you write your essay. It’ll be good enough for you to speedrun whatever it is you’re trying to learn. It’ll be good enough to give you not just the officially accepted best practices, but every hack and shortcut imaginable.

It’s not about the amount of money. The global economy has gone up by $20 trillion since the COVID dip in 2020, and the world hasn’t fallen apart (debate me).

It’s about what that money would imply. A $20 trillion contribution from AI means the entire structure of our society has been fundamentally altered. The distribution of jobs. The way we design our businesses and organizations. The speed of everything.

It’s already happening in finance. High-frequency traders operate on a millisecond timescale. They’re so fast that the physical location of their servers makes a material difference in the outcome. Being a mile or two closer to the exchange than your competitor gives you a nanosecond advantage in getting your trade executed.

In a $20 trillion AI future, anything to do with paperwork will be instant: The formation of corporations. A decision on your mortgage. The execution of your estate.

In our Internet world, in our MediaInsider world, our customers will not be humans but AI agent shoppers; our job will no longer be capturing emotion but gaming algorithms.

Perhaps, in a $20 trillion AI future, AI-generated slop has drowned the Internet. Perhaps deepfakes have made it impossible to forge true brand connections. Perhaps AI has broken all encryption and everything has collapsed.

None of the above is factual. It’s all wild speculation. And that’s my point.

Nobody knows what a $20 trillion AI world looks like. The only thing we know is that it’s not just 20% growth from the present day. It’s a world that is radically different from our current one.

Buckle up.