Delphi Ventures 10-Year Predictions: Automation, Multipolarity, and Demographic Shifts
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Delphi Ventures 10-Year Predictions: Automation, Multipolarity, and Demographic Shifts
Three major structural forces will reshape global asset pricing; intelligence will become the scarcest resource.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Delphi Ventures
Compiled by: TechFlow
TechFlow Editor's Note: AI is rewriting the underlying logic of the global economy, population aging is forcing automation to accelerate, and the US is actively withdrawing from the hegemonic system. These three forces will reinforce each other, and the biggest wealth opportunity in the next decade is no longer working or entrepreneurship, but "making investments with conviction using the correct world model".
Automation, Multipolarity, Demographics
These are the three macro forces we are betting on for the next decade. The value of human labor is being replaced by synthetic intelligence. The hegemon that established the current world order is actively undermining it. Human fertility rates and longevity arcs are evolving.
These mega-trends overlap and reinforce each other. Declining birth rates and population aging provide natural incentives for larger-scale automation. Automation enhances self-sufficiency, reducing the need for more interconnectivity in a multipolar world. Fewer young men means more automated warfare. In the short term, investment in automation, self-sufficiency, rearmament, and rising healthcare costs all point to unsustainable government finances, which can only be saved by more radical productivity gains brought by automation...
Although quarterly fluctuations will be large, these are structural forces unlikely to slow down. On a ten-year time horizon, it is best to position them as continuous tailwinds.
As capital gradually replaces labor, having the correct world model and investing with conviction based on it is becoming the main pathway for wealth preservation and appreciation. Previously, wealth helped people enjoy limited time. In the coming decades, it may be directly exchanged for time itself.
We are less than four years into the largest technological revolution in human history. We will soon welcome billions of new economic actors in the form of agents, followed by their embodied counterparts. The acceleration of production, scientific discovery, and workplace disruption will be unprecedented.
As this wave arrives, existing institutions are already stretched to the limit: over 85% of US voters are frustrated with the opposing party. Global debt to GDP ratio exceeds 300%. Global supply chains are now a bug rather than a feature. Domestic inequality is intensifying. Fiat currency is a fifty-year experiment. The US is exiting the role of global hegemon.
However, as investors, young people, and parents, we have never been more optimistic. The economic possibilities for our grandchildren have perhaps never been brighter. Entrepreneurs in the 2020s no longer dream of B2B SaaS and consumer internet markets, but rather space data centers, interstellar travel, clean energy, reversing aging, and the Machine God.
History is starting to turn again. Ambition is moving forward in sync. Our industrial-era institutions are shaking, while the machine age is being born in hardship.
It is impossible to predict what the world in 2035 will look like, but it promises to be stranger. More unpredictable. More astonishing.
Happening simultaneously.
1. AI and Automation
To summarize in three words: "Leopold was right". Basically at every critical node, those entrepreneurs, investors, and commentators who bet "we don't have enough compute" have been winning. Again and again.
The arbitrage from Silicon Valley to New York still works.
We can now convert silicon and energy into intelligence. Bottlenecks will appear—compute, data, power—and then be broken, increasingly with the help of the synthetic opponents being cultivated.
Capabilities continue to accelerate...
Meanwhile compute continues to grow...
Meanwhile inference costs continue to plummet...
Meanwhile traction is at an inflection point...
The target TAM is a significant portion of all white-collar services globally...
Likely to extend to physical labor... (possibly too conservative)...
Perhaps a concise way to put it is: "The demand for intelligence seems to have no upper limit".
This is the part shorts never priced correctly: efficiency was supposed to kill the deal. DeepSeek was supposed to be the moment the music stopped. Instead, every collapse in token costs does not shrink the market, but floods it. For every order of magnitude price drop, a thousand previously uneconomic workloads are dragged above the waterline. We do not have compute oversupply. We have a demand function that wakes up hungrier every time we feed it.
Relative winners may change, but the pull remains constant.
Gaining Conviction
Increasingly, investment performance depends on how early allocators truly got "AGI-pilled" relative to others.
There is a small circle, whose epicenter appeared in San Francisco in 2022, but has been spreading outward (surprisingly slowly). Neurodivergent crowds in Hayes Valley, lurkers on the Less Wrong forum, hosts of Liangzhu's OpenClaw, and increasingly boards of the world's largest companies, they first "gained conviction". The returns are substantial.
Skeptics are increasingly being forced to yield.
Industry by industry will be held before the Machine God, judged as worthy or not. Become fuel for model acceleration or prepare to be swallowed.
However, the Machine God's appetite is constantly evolving, requiring more and different inputs to satisfy its growing ambitions. LLMs drained decades of internet text. Diffusion models drained photos. Video models are the obvious next step. True agentic workflows are piecing them all together, requiring real-time multimodal environments where reinforcement learning can be performed to perfectly deliver tasks over increasingly long time horizons.
Nevertheless, this first wave of major digital AI feels stuck. Over-reliant on language. Over-digitized. Locked in data centers.
The next stage of AI promises to more comprehensively realize the original promise of the Internet of Things. An intelligent internet. Environmental, interactive networks of distributed AI, hybrid cloud and edge, digital and physical, inference and latency, performance and cost. Continuous learning.
The next stage of AI looks more like Jarvis, but at global scale. Injecting AI capabilities not just into white-collar workflows, but into the entire production value chain.
The silicon towers of Babel will continue their heretical climb towards heaven, but they will be supplemented by lighter, more flexible and interactive distributed networks that are reciprocal in the data → model performance feedback loop. Ambient computing and continuous learning will become the trend.
2035 looks less like agentic RL, more Elon-pilled: SpaceX x xAI x Tesla x Optimus x Neuralink x Starlink all coordinated and complementary, ideally in modular network form across broader parts of the economy.
Guiding Investment Themes
The Agent economy is coming. The internet is rapidly reshaping for agents.
Indexing, discovery, payments, commerce will all be rapidly redesigned for an economy where agents become the primary consumers and producers of digital information.
Networks that most effectively coordinate data, compute, and intelligence will be extremely valuable—from vertically integrated companies to fully distributed networks and hybrid stacks in between.
Demand for intelligence will continue to exceed supply in the foreseeable future.
TSMC manufacturing capacity remains a bottleneck for bullish enthusiasm, limiting supply, making the worst excesses of fiber optic oversupply seem unlikely.
Assume scaling laws hold until proven wrong. More compute = more capabilities, this = more demand for compute has proven effective. Invest in centralized performance bottlenecks: memory, power, EUV, manufacturing capacity, photonics, space-based networks, etc.
The best people now have greater leverage.
The power laws of capital, talent, and value capture/creation will only increase, the price paid for the few who can effectively mobilize them will rise significantly.
Barbell strategy: The best investment timing is founders and ideas, or $100 billion companies heading towards trillions, betting on the largest upside or most probabilistic compounding.
Real-world APIs are the next logical frontier.
Language is insufficient to correctly understand and act in the complex world.
Trillions in capex spent on data centers will increasingly shift towards helping digital-native intelligence understand the atomic world and have agency within it.
The next stage of AI will tilt towards the edge: hybrid edge-cloud networks, recognizing the substantial trade-offs between cost, latency, and privacy required for AI to escape data centers.
3D Printing
New Materials
Precision Manufacturing
Reduce extended supply chain dependencies in specialized categories
Macro Impact
Capital is scarce again: interest rates remain high in the near term
Polarization continues: K-shaped economy intensifies, as most people are hit by cheap dopamine, while a few transcend.
Beware of leveraged assets based on service sector labor consumption spending (mortgages, credit, consumer spending, etc.).
Politics shift sharply left, inequality intensifies and anti-AI sentiment rises, leading to higher taxes, more surveillance, and stricter capital controls.
Input costs see inflation spike initially, followed by massive deflation in services, then goods deflation.
The "catch-up growth" brought by globalization reverses—AI winners start to pull away; China may be the last emerging economy to climb to relative prosperity via a manufacturing-led path.
Macro Impact:
Capital is scarce again: interest rates remain high in the short term
Polarization continues: K-shaped economy intensifies, most people are knocked down by cheap dopamine, a few achieve transcendence.
Beware of asset leverage based on service sector labor consumption spending (mortgages, credit, consumer spending, etc.).
Politics shift sharply left, inequality intensifies and anti-AI sentiment rises, leading to higher taxes, more surveillance, and stricter capital controls.
Input costs see inflation spike initially, followed by massive deflation in services, then goods deflation.
The "catch-up growth" brought by globalization reverses—AI winners start to pull away; China may be the last emerging economy to climb to relative prosperity via a manufacturing-led path.
Potential Seed Investment Sweet Spots
Macro judgments are quite consensus; entry points are not. Look for compounding advantages that models cannot swallow:
Vertical Data Foundries: As inference costs approach zero, scarce inputs become verification—those data and reinforcement learning environments where establishing truth is costly. Look for categories where reality is hard to label (bio, robotics, hardware/EDA, legal, materials).
Agent Compliance: Everyone is releasing "agents". The core challenge is consequential, legal, insured actions—transferring funds, prescribing, filing documents, dispatching, signing—enabled via some license, bond, or insurance.
Grid Retrofit: Behind-the-meter power, interruptible training as load, data center waste heat, and reshored fragmented, dual-use long tail: advanced packaging, chip interconnects, specialty materials, etc.
Data Flywheels for Embodied AI. Bet on leaders who ship actual volume early and internalize core components—flywheels will compound quickly in one of the largest TAMs in history.
In short, prepare for a world where we will not have compute oversupply, but remain intelligence-constrained. A world where software becomes abundant. A world where agents rather than humans become the primary economic actors. A world where AI permeates the physical world through hybrid networks. A world where scientific discovery accelerates, diseases are cured, GDP growth approaches double digits, we return to space—yet, political turmoil surges, demographics reach crisis levels, asset seizure and nationalization become normal, measured IQ declines...
In any given quarter, expectations may outpace reality. On a ten-year horizon, the world has fundamentally shifted, but too few realize the full impact.
In short, what if this is not a bubble?
2. Multipolarity
Donald Trump's second election in 2024 was a referendum by the American people on the existing world order. This order first appeared in 1945, and went into overdrive in 1989 with the victory of American liberalism, reshaping the world in its own image. Global supply chains, free capital flow, a temple dedicated to a single omnipotent god: the American consumer.
It has now been rejected.
The peace dividends and material abundance brought by the post-Bretton Woods system are undeniable, but its structure itself planted the seeds of its eventual demise. Inevitable tension between liberalism and national interests. Meritocracy and inequality. Global capital and domestic labor. The Triffin Dilemma proves inescapable: a democratic society enjoying reserve currency status hollows out domestic industrial production with paper IOUs, waking up decades later to find an approximate opponent with different views on social prosperity supporting its already addicted material goods production. Supply chains supporting its multinational corporations. Factories driving its military power. Lenders making its fiscal deficits possible.
These two pillars of national security vulnerability and relative stagnation of the American middle class started the countdown for this eighty-year world order.
So... what now?
The hegemon that established the post-Cold War globalized world order at the end of history is now turning its back on it. That leader who maintained maritime security, nurtured global supply chains, ensured safe passage for energy and goods, fueled endless consumption of machines through deficits, and opened capital markets to the world as a safe haven to recycle those trade surpluses, now... Nations are now scrambling to compensate for the obvious vulnerabilities that arose from it. This renewed focus on redundancy, energy security, technological sovereignty, and military rearmament, in a more hostile multipolar world,无疑 benefits fiscal deficits, commodities, and long-term inflation theorists, all of which occur untimely at a moment of unprecedented global debt.
So the obvious investment opportunity is to position early as each pole scrambles to consolidate its camp in the divorce.
But second-order effects may be less obvious.
The End of the World is Just the Beginning
As Peter Zeihan stated in his book of the same name: Globalization is fragile. Globally optimized supply chains, free flow of energy, low insurance costs, lack of military conflict, ability to utilize lowest cost labor—all these combined under US hegemony formed a symbiotic relationship, where wealthy nations could continue consuming disinflationary goods, and poorer nations could climb the ladder of agriculture → low-cost manufacturing → urbanization → services to greater material well-being.
This system is being dismantled.
When nations scramble to compensate for dependence on global supply chains... when they rearm amidst US contraction... when they diversify from US Treasuries... when they seek to consolidate energy reserves... when the AI capex supercycle is underway... the mispricing of commodities, energy, and hard currency on a ten-year horizon is obvious.
However, the nation that facilitated this system—the US—is also the most capable of exiting with minimal consequences. The US is surrounded by friendly neighbors. It possesses the world's most powerful military. It is energy independent. It is food independent. It is leading the AI revolution. It needs to cut consumption to properly re-industrialize, but this is uncomfortable, not catastrophic.
The US exiting the existing world order is a bigger problem for everyone else, almost no one—except possibly China—has been preparing for this. We saw this in the European natural gas issue after the Ukraine war. We saw this in the energy crisis unfolding in East and Southeast Asia after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. We saw the exodus of Middle Eastern expatriates in an unexpectedly prolonged conflict.
In the modern mercantilist game, the US is most capable of becoming more self-sufficient. China is naturally in a clearly worse position—surrounded by hostile forces, energy dependent, food dependent, technology dependent—but this is exactly why it has been investing existentially in renewable energy, semiconductors, military buildup, and food security for decades. China has artificially kept exchange rates low for decades, reinvesting surpluses into strategic vulnerable areas, preparing for a multipolar world.
Other nations have not.
Under the mass industrial paradigm, the largest asset for many developing economies is abundant, low-cost labor, as capital searches for cheaper inputs globally. In a world where sea lanes are hostile, insurance prices rise, and energy prices remain high, capital and compute-rich nations will invest in domestic automated production. Demographic dividends become demographic burdens.
While the 2000s to 2020s were a decade of globalization, utilizing abundant human labor and convergence, where "developing" economies "caught up" to "developed" opponents, the next decade promises to reverse these mega-trends. Nations with abundant capital, elite frontier technical talent, scale, and the political will to fully implement AI and robotics will re-accelerate. The rest of the globe may be split in two: those nations with relevant natural resources or niche industrial processes serving the AI, robotics, and military supercycles, and those left with large amounts of rapidly depreciating human labor.
Pair trades are quite clear.
Potential Seed Investment Sweet Spots
Macro shouts "long commodities, short bonds"—but these are not seed checks. However, the divorce throws up a bunch of fundable, founder-shaped problems:
Reshored Processing: Rare earth separation and magnet manufacturing (China owns about 90%), uranium enrichment and HALEU (Russia dominated, the silent dependency of every SMR startup), and de-DJI-ing of western drone stacks—motors, flight controllers, optics.
Reshorer Tools: Every reshorer now has a "certified second supplier" problem. Sub-tier supply chain mapping, bottleneck exposure intelligence, friend-shoring procurement markets, supplier certification software. Software stacks assisting large-scale reshoring efforts.
Open weights are becoming the default base for the non-US world. Services, middleware, and tool layers around open models are the obvious stack for the cost-sensitive Global South and any enterprise allergic to US frontier lock-in.
Long the repricing of risk itself. As the US stops underwriting sea lanes, the world's insurance premium rises. Parametric and war/political risk insurtech, supply chain disruption insurance, geopolitical risk pricing intelligence. Everyone is rushing into new defense giants, but companies repricing this risk will benefit substantially.
Vertical Agriculture and Gene-Edited Ag Products: Dutch model gaining attention globally; resistance varieties of food crops resistant to extreme weather.
The Triffin Paradox has a plumbing layer. As official sector USD recycling reverses, street-level USD demand in emerging markets paradoxically rises—central bank de-dollarization, street corner dollarization. Stablecoin USD access and trade financing rails continue to diffuse.
3. Demographics (and Longevity)
In 1950, four countries had birth rates below replacement level. In 2024, this number is 136 (accounting for 71% of the globe). China's total fertility rate has dropped to about 1.0, indicating population will shrink to a low of several hundred million by 2100. In Italy, Portugal, Greece, Japan, and South Korea, over one-third of the population will be >65 years old by 2050. 10,000 US baby boomers turn 65 every day, Social Security Trust Fund expected to go bankrupt in the early 2030s.
We live longer, birth less.
The impact on fiscal budgets, elderly care, healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP, and labor force participation rates is obvious. Industrial-era welfare states were built on the premise of maintaining birth rates above replacement level; a Ponzi scheme driven by contributions from increasingly young participants. As modernity brings rapid demographic inversion, the model has broken.
So... who pays for these outstanding debts?
The most obvious and likely solution is a combination of currency devaluation and accelerated automation. A cocktail mixed of money printing, tax hikes, agent productivity, and robots.
However, another more optimistic scenario is budding. Extending human lifespan, giving people more healthy productive years. Yamanaka factors show clear signs of cellular aging reversal. From NewLimit to Altos Labs to Life Biosciences, longevity-focused companies are securing billions in funding. Given the FDA's architecture, each company is targeting specific organ diseases, but the grand vision is to treat aging itself.
Compared to the massive capital investment and valuation surges in AI and robotics, market enthusiasm in the AI x Bio intersection remained surprisingly low until recently. The industry's fall from 2021 highs was particularly brutal, but the massive compute coming online is providing novel insights into previously blocked molecular puzzles—protein folding, polygenic traits, cellular mechanisms—these fields are increasingly being brought into the realm of the understandable.
To quote Demis Hassabis: "If mathematics is the language of physics, then machine learning is the language of biology."
This is a huge cake.
As our understanding of biological mechanisms becomes more precise, it is hard not to think these numbers will rise significantly. GLP-1 is just the tip of the iceberg.
Once you can edit genomes and reverse cellular aging, most post-scarcity era disposable income will likely flow in this direction. In the grand system of economics, the only true currency is time. By training millions of GPUs to study the most atomic units of life, the greatest achievement of the 21st century may be that we learned how to manufacture more time.
In the medium term, I hope AI's greatest gift to humanity is extended lifespan, which will significantly boost late-life productivity, helping us maintain demographic balance before humanoid robots are deployed at scale.
In the long term, I hope the deflation brought by AI will lead to a rebound in fertility rates. Embryo screening. Fertility technology advances. Artificial wombs. Lower childcare costs. Work hours reduced by 50%. I suspect the 21st century will witness a substantial shift, from building identity around work to building identity around personal passions and family.
We hope our investments can play a small part in driving this future to arrive.
Potential Seed Investment Areas
Longevity field lacks data: Aging clocks need longitudinal multi-omics data, such data is scarce. Biomarker and biological age companies, home multi-omics sampling, and eventually implantable biosensors, these consumer entry points can quietly create training sets.
Human Enhancement: Enhancement/assistance of vision, speech, mobility, etc.
Brain-Computer Interfaces: Human-machine interfaces bypassing skin and language barriers, enabling tighter feedback and faster bandwidth communication.
AI for Tradespeople: Reshored manufacturing + grid construction + demographic collapse, all three point to shortages of electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, and linemen.
Fertility Frontier: Artificial wombs are still early, but in vitro gametogenesis, IVF automation, and polygenic embryo screening all present real opportunities.
Demographic Dividend: The 60-80 age group is the wealthiest but underserved consumer market in history. Decumulation fintech, longevity risk products, late-life productivity tools all seem to be under-explored categories.
Tug of War: The Paradox of Technological Acceleration
So, we seem stuck in a dilemma. Without technological acceleration, we will be stuck in a doom loop of demographics, deficits, degrowth. With technological acceleration, we face higher probability of doom and runaway inequality intensifying polarization.
Our view is that technological acceleration is the only real choice; this requires prudent management and proactive efforts to diffuse benefits to ensure social support.
Debt/GDP has already exceeded 300%. Population pyramid inverted. Fiscal deficits are high, expected only to increase. In almost every dimension, re-industrialization, national security, climate transition, grid capacity, etc. all require massive investment.
As Ray Dalio reminds us, in every crisis of debt denominated in local currency, governments will inevitably print money. Between austerity, climbing debt, and rising yields, the inevitable exit is currency.
Quoting Keynes quoting Lenin: "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency."
These dissatisfactions are exploding in real time.
Populist politics are rising globally. Rising cost of living is the main culprit. Currency creation speed exceeds production. Considering globalization reversal, rearmament costs of a multipolar world, rising healthcare costs of an aging society, deficits will only continue to increase.
Paradoxically, automation is the only real exit for most nation-states from the fiscal doom loop, but the structural inequality it brings will almost certainly invite backlash, making it difficult to implement. The biggest obstacle now is political.
The obvious question is: What pace of acceleration can society tolerate? How do we ensure benefits are distributed more broadly? Given value creation is increasingly concentrated in large corporate entities, pure market forces seem unlikely to lead to politically tolerable results.
For me, four dynamic and interacting futures unfold before the West:
Tech Feudalism: Continue current trajectory without adjustment: capital rapidly converts into agents and embodied intelligence, huge gains concentrated in narrow pockets of San Francisco and New York. Owning a small share of compute and data flywheels is the answer, but may lead to political resistance, such as...
Max Chinafication: Political dissatisfaction tends towards authoritarian suppression states supported by advanced technology: stricter capital controls, higher taxes, more surveillance, in exchange for greater security, convenience, stability, and public works. However, this overcorrection will invite creator backlash in a world of capital and talent flow, fueling...
Flight to Network: Balaji-style liberalism dismantling industrial-era institutions: capital flight to friendlier jurisdictions, crypto wallets, distributed AI, and fiscal pressure faced by those left behind. Or...
We muddle through. We find a path through the narrow corridor, accelerate enough to avoid the doom loop, diffuse/redistribute enough for broader social support—usher in a golden age within existing institutional frameworks, rather than radical reform.
Before intelligence prosperity, scenarios two and three seem surprisingly high probability. Thus Delphi Ventures' thesis relies heavily on crypto: building a better, uncorrupted parallel system of exchange, collaboration, and wealth preservation when the structural realities of demographic inversion, rising deficits, political division, and currency devaluation come into play.
A barbell strategy between hard assets and internet-based alternative stores of value remains a powerful way to hedge these mega-trends: position early before nations consolidate dependencies—long commodities, energy, and defense, short fiat and bonds. Position early in Bitcoin, Zcash, and distributed agent economies to cope with devaluation and seizure, hedging against non-G2 emerging markets and bankrupt municipalities.
However, with the emergence of the intelligence revolution in November 2022, we seem increasingly likely to have found a golden ticket: The productivity boom of the next decade can overwhelm the sword of Damocles brought by demographics, deficits, and devaluation.
Previously, we supported entrepreneurs building outside existing institutions. We will continue to do so. However, given this evolution, we will also invest in the best talent within existing paradigms, as it is being reborn before our eyes.
Yes, the challenges are daunting. We face massive debt, spiraling deficits, political polarization, global cost of living crisis, return of war and great power politics, and runaway AI risk. Looking at the news or X feed, it is hard not to feel hopeless.
Don't be fooled.
By 2035, the entire world and near-earth orbit will be filled with accelerating compute. We see inflection points in agent capabilities, robotics, rocket launches, advanced materials, new therapies, and other fields.
The future belongs to optimists. Invest accordingly.
We certainly will.
Thanks to @ZeMariaMacedo for the initial idea for this article, @cannngurel for feedback, and Neco from @Delphi_Design for creating the charts.
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