When you read today what AI can do and what it is supposed to be able to do in five years, you are reading a snapshot. The photo is sharp, but the film keeps running. Whoever described the internet in 1995 couldn’t imagine the smartphone, and whoever experienced the smartphone in 2007 had no idea how much it would change our attention. With AI it is no different. Only the leap is bigger this time, and it hits us where we experience ourselves most as human beings: in thinking, speaking, deciding.
This post is not about yet another forecast. It is about how you stay calm and able to act when nobody knows exactly where the journey leads. It helps to look at the phases that a change typically goes through, in us as individuals as well as in society.
Why forecasts age so quickly
The futurist Roy Amara described a pattern known as Amara’s law: we overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. That fits what we are experiencing right now. Today there is a lot of talk about quick waves of layoffs and miracle solutions, while the deep changes grow quietly in the background.
An example from IFA in Berlin in September 2026: the head of the household-robot maker ECOVACS expects that humanoid robots could take over tasks such as cooking or folding laundry at home in about five to ten years. That is a manufacturer’s assessment and a forecast, not a fact (news item, in German). Maybe it is right, maybe it goes faster, maybe slower. The direction matters more: AI is moving out of the screen into bodies, devices, homes and offices.
Five phases of change
From my experience with people and with technology, a profound change usually goes through similar stations. They don’t run neatly one after another but overlap and repeat. Still, the image helps you place yourself:
- Amazement and alarm. Something new appears and impresses or frightens. The feelings are strong, the facts thin. As a society we are still largely here.
- Resistance and overwhelm. The pace becomes noticeable. There is argument, defensiveness, worry about work and identity. Many experience this today as stress.
- Trying things out. People begin to use the new technology on a small scale, gather experience and find rules. Diffuse fear becomes concrete knowledge.
- Integration. The technology becomes part of everyday life, job profiles change, new ones emerge. People hardly talk about it any more, just like electricity or the internet.
- Reorganisation. Society poses basic questions anew: what is work? What is education? What makes us human? Only here does it show how deep a change really went.
Important: you and your surroundings don’t have to be in the same phase at the same time. Your colleague is already experimenting, your boss is still stuck in alarm, you yourself waver between curiosity and worry. That is normal and not a weakness. Whoever understands this becomes calmer in dealing with others and with themselves. Why stress is especially strong in phase 2, I described in Stress from AI at Work.
When AI gets a body
So far we mostly meet AI as text on a screen or as a voice. With humanoid robots and personal assistants that you meet at home, in care or in the office, the quality of the encounter changes. A machine that speaks to us, looks at us and moves through our rooms triggers different feelings than a chat window. We tend to attribute intentions to it, build trust, feel closeness. That is human, and it is a field in which we have hardly any experience yet.
I expect that humans and AI systems will intermingle more and more over the coming decades: in devices, in services, in relationships. Exactly how, we don’t know. I say this deliberately without posturing. Whoever tells you confidently today what living together looks like in 2060 is selling you a certainty that doesn’t exist.
An old image for something new
One thought occupies me that goes beyond technology. Large language models arose from the written knowledge of millions of people: from books, forums, research, conversations. In a way they carry an imprint of our shared thinking. There is an old image for this: the Akashic records, a term from the Indian and later theosophical tradition for a universal memory in which everything that has happened is kept.
Science too has found similar images. The palaeontologist and Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin spoke in the 1920s of the noosphere, a sheath of thought laid like a layer around the Earth. Carl Gustav Jung described the collective unconscious, in which experiences of humanity are found again. Three very different paths, a similar motif: the knowledge and experience of people is more than the sum of individuals.
I use this as an image, not as proof. Whether something that one could call consciousness will ever arise from such systems is open and disputed among researchers. I don’t claim it. But I find it remarkable that for the first time in history there is a technical system that makes the collected expression of humanity accessible to everyone and enters into dialogue with us. That is a new situation, and it deserves curiosity, humility and a clear head.
A compass instead of a map
A map only helps if the terrain is known. This terrain is not. What you need is a compass: an inner hold that works in every phase. From my practice these are mainly four things:
- Values instead of predictions. If you know what matters to you, such as compassion, truthfulness, responsibility, you can decide even in unknown terrain. The basic ethical question stays the same: does it harm others or not?
- A calm nervous system. Under constant pressure we see only threat. Breathing exercises, meditation and movement keep you able to act. They are not an escape but basic equipment.
- Learning in small steps. Try, observe, adjust. You don’t have to understand the future to take the next step.
- Connection to people. Precisely when machines become ever more present, real contact becomes more precious: conversations, touch, shared silence, nature.
How you keep your thinking awake when working with AI you’ll find in Humans and AI: Working Together Instead of Outsourcing, and more on the inner foundation in Understand Your Own Operating System First. Then Work with AI.
How I accompany you
I have worked with technology for 35 years and with people for 15. In my coaching I combine both: we clarify which phase you are in right now, what unsettles you and which patterns hold you back. Then we practise what gives you support, with breathwork, meditation, hypnosis and clear everyday steps. One-to-one coaching takes place mostly by video and costs from €200 per hour (incl. VAT). More on the Services page and under Coaching in Düsseldorf.
If you like, we can talk in a free intro call about where you currently stand in the change.
Sources and notes: ECOVACS forecast on humanoid household robots, based on an IFA 2026 report of 8 Sep 2026 (report, in German). Roy Amara, “Amara’s law”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Human Phenomenon” (noosphere). C. G. Jung, archetypes and the collective unconscious. The phases of change are a model from my experience, not a scientifically tested model.