AI + The New Human Frontier

CHAPTER 3How To Think about the Future

Too often, pundits and strategists assume that the world will return to the point of known stasis from which it began. As a case in point, witness the seemingly endless stream of predictions from trusted sources who speculated during the COVID-19 pandemic about when the world would return to “normal.” To assume that there is a fixed baseline to which the world and its institutions will return is an oversimplification—and likely a heuristic that allows for many people to feel more secure about a “predictable” future for themselves.

The world doesn't operate according to the principles of a pendulum. The mental image we have for cycles is that whatever the object of attention, activity will go in one direction for just so long—perhaps too long—and then swing back, past center, to its original point, and then the process will begin all over again. When we see emotions of a society swing too far out to an extreme, we anticipate a course correction and a swing back to center and then to the opposite extreme and then back again. When we see stock prices rise dramatically and then fall dramatically and then rise and fall, over time we expect the same conditions to prevail, causing the pendulum to continue swinging back and forth around some central point.

Things cannot possibly retrace their path back to where they have been. The context has changed. Places are not the same; people are not the same; nothing is exactly the same as it was before. ...