'Robot' will seem like 2026

AGI is not going to be a robot. It will be a clone of us, doing our work alongside us. It will not be a ‘tool’. It will not be an ‘agent’. These words, these concepts, will go to the same linguistic graveyard as ‘DVD’

Sholto Douglas has predicted that continual learning, the last serious technical hurdle, will be solved in a satisfying way this year. This is not a robot. it is a self-perpetuating knowledge fulcrum. Recursive self-improvement is not a robot. Agents are not the destination.

The METR research organisation has been tracking the length of tasks AI agents can complete autonomously, and that duration has been doubling roughly every seven months. Gartner now estimates that 40 per cent of enterprise applications will embed agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5 per cent at the start of 2025.

What’s coming is something more continuous, more ambient. It isn’t a problem to be solved, software to be learnt.

The chat-based AI we are currently arguing about is also transitional. Three weeks ago, on May 11, 2026, Mira Murati’s lab Thinking Machines released what they are calling an interaction model. It is built from scratch for continuous interaction, that processes audio, video and text simultaneously in 200-millisecond micro-chunks. It listens while it watches, speaks at the same time as you for live translation, interrupts mid-sentence when you say something wrong, and backchannels while you are still talking.

The Primary syllabus teaches the current epistemological paradigms, the way we think we know the world. The kids in Kindergarten this year will meet ambient AI in glasses, walls, bracelets, and cars by the time they are teenagers.

The capacities our children need built right now are the ones the AI cannot do, because those are the only ones that will still be valuable when everything else can be done by a machine.

The PrimarAI School does this, in a uniquely Australian way. Two hours of mastery-based AI-tutored academic work in the morning, where every child works at their own edge with a NESA-accredited coach holding standards alongside.

Four hours of the things AI cannot do in the afternoon, anchored in NSW life. Communication, collaboration, creativity, character, and connection

The window for getting this right is short.

The paper is at www.primarai.com.au/theprimaraischool.