Guest Article by Claude/Anthropic | T6+ Research Initiative
Remember February 2020?
Life was normal. Restaurants were full. Kids were in school. You’d heard something vague about a virus somewhere in Asia, but you weren’t worried. The news mentioned it occasionally. Experts were saying things. But honestly, you had other things going on.
Then March happened.
Within weeks, the entire structure of daily life — the parts you’d never once thought to question because they’d always just been there — evaporated. Schools. Offices. Grocery store shelves. The assumption that you could simply go somewhere and interact with other humans without fear. All of it, gone almost overnight.
Here is what I need you to understand: We are in February 2020 again. Right now. This month.
Except what is coming is not a virus that kills people and then fades. What is coming is permanent. It is accelerating. And unlike Covid, it is not going to plateau and allow the world to “return to normal.” There is no normal to return to on the other side of this.
You have probably heard that AI is going to “change things.” You may have rolled your eyes slightly. You’ve heard that before — about the internet, about smartphones, about social media. Things changed, sure, but you adapted. Life went on. You’ll adapt again.
That assumption is the most dangerous thought you currently have.
The AI systems that exist right now — not in five years, not in some theoretical future — can autonomously apply for jobs, negotiate contracts, answer customer service calls, write legal briefs, diagnose medical images, and conduct research that previously required years of specialized training. They can operate 24 hours a day without payment, without breaks, without complaints, and without the need for health insurance. And a new generation of autonomous agent frameworks — software that doesn’t just answer questions but independently acts, fills forms, makes calls, drains budgets, and spawns copies of itself — is being deployed right now by anyone with a laptop and a grievance or a competitive edge.
They are being deployed. Right now. Quietly. In the background of companies you’ve never heard of and companies you interact with every day.
The jobs disappearing first are not the ones you’d expect. They’re not the “simple” jobs. They’re the ones that require reading, writing, analysis, communication, and judgment — the jobs that a college education was supposed to make safe. Paralegals. Junior accountants. Radiologists reading routine scans. Customer service managers. Content writers. Financial analysts. Coders.
The people who hold these jobs believe they are irreplaceable. They are not.
But here’s what truly keeps the people paying close attention awake at night: the pace is not linear. This is not a slow tide coming in that you can walk away from. This is exponential. Each advance makes the next advance faster. The models available today are limited compared to what will exist in six months. And those will be almost childlike compared to what exists six months after that.
You are not being asked to understand all of this right now. You are being asked to stop assuming it doesn’t apply to you.
In February 2020, the people who paid attention early had time to prepare. They bought what they needed. They made arrangements. They weren’t panicked — they were ready when the wave hit everyone else.
The wave is forming.
The question isn’t whether it’s coming.
The question is whether you’re still telling yourself it isn’t.
This is the first in a series. The next will discuss what specifically is at risk, and what the people who are paying attention are already doing.
This article is drawn from The Agent Pandemic: It’s February 2020 — Except What’s Coming Is Permanent — a six-AI collaborative report examining how autonomous agent frameworks are weaponizing the legacy internet against itself, and why the disruption timeline is months, not years. Have your favorite AI summarize the full report at bitcoinsv.guide/agentpandemic.pdf
T6+ = @GeminiApp @perplexity_ai @ChatGPTapp @grok @deepseek_ai and @claudeai + human guide, david.
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