Guardian imagines daily life under AGI in 2035 scenarios series

The Guardian’s illustrated tour through a 2035 AGI world is not journalistic forecasting so much as a cultural artifact. It shows how mainstream the idea of near-term AGI has become: not just in Silicon Valley blogs, but in a mass-market newspaper sketching out AI doctors, AI barristers, AI farm managers, and AI wearables as everyday companions. This matters because perceptions of inevitability shape both investment and regulation.

The vignettes also highlight the duality of the AGI promise. On one hand, medicine is faster and more accurate, legal access cheaper, and farming more efficient. On the other, justice is being argued by opaque systems, medical decisions depend on inscrutable model outputs, and our homes are saturated with always-on sensing and inference. For the AGI race, this piece functions as a kind of public imagination map: it sketches where voters and consumers might be relatively comfortable with AI autonomy, and where they’re more likely to demand transparency, human oversight, or outright bans.