The Future: We Are Doomed. We Are Fine.

The confusing and messy reality of forecasts – and why the people who make them, make them…

Anyone who tells you they can predict the future is probably just trying to own it.
~ Margaret Heffernan

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few months, you have not been able to avoid the cacophony of Op-Eds simultaneously proclaiming “the end of white-collar work” and inherent doomsday levels of mass unemployment, along with the assertion that Jevons’s paradox will take care of us all and that employees (and their employment) will be just fine.

Just in the last couple of weeks, we had Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei say that AI will lead to a world where “cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced — and 20 percent of people don’t have jobs,” while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warns that “every job will be affected, and immediately.” Meanwhile, The Economist reports that white-collar jobs are rising and even translation jobs—supposedly AI’s first victim—are up 7% year-over-year.

What is one to make of all of this? I am constantly reminded by a series of conversations I have had throughout my career with people who have made establishing a firm (and realistic) grip on the future of their work a priority. The very best of them (as in: they are true students of the tools, frameworks, and approaches to make better sense of our inherently messy and unknowable future) all start with an important caveat: Nobody can actually tell you what the future will look like.

The future is dynamic, constantly changing, reacting to countless stimuli, and thus shifting. Add to this what complexity theory teaches us – that small changes can have massive, unpredictable effects (think of how a single app like Uber transformed entire urban transportation systems) – and predicting the future becomes truly a fool’s errand. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can’t (and absolutely should) constantly aim to get better at predicting and preparing for possible futures. To do so, we need to develop a keen understanding of the possible and probable futures (want more on this? Check out my post from last week).

This brings us to the second caveat that keen students of the future will offer – when someone tells you they know what the future looks like, you always have to ask about their motivation. Everybody who presents you with a very specific version of the future has something to sell – their version of the future. And their version of the future typically either involves a future that their product or service has made possible or helps you deal with when said future comes to pass.

Is it any wonder that every CEO of an AI startup tells you that we will see mass unemployment when their eye-watering valuations imply massive productivity gains for their clients – which can only happen when we get rid of a lot of those pesky, expensive humans?

The current AI mania (especially the current fixation on employment) reminds me of the wondrous world of “disruption” about ten years ago. A time when self-proclaimed “futurists” shouted “you will be disrupted” in keynotes with such ridiculous titles as “Why your business is becoming Kodak’ed” – and sold the cure right alongside their claims of our businesses all going the way of the dodo. Ten years later, most of those businesses are still here, adapted but not extinct – a reminder that apocalyptic predictions rarely match messy reality.

So what should we do? First, diversify your information sources – read both the optimists and pessimists. Second, focus on building adaptable skills rather than betting on specific predictions. Finally, remember that the future isn’t something that happens to us – it’s something we actively create through our choices today.

The next time you see one of those attention-grabbing headlines, do yourself the favor of stepping back, asking yourself who is saying what for what purpose – and take solace in Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr’s insight that “It is very difficult to predict, especially the future.”

@Pascal