Uncertainty just hit 2x pandemic levels
Inside: The World Uncertainty Index surge, LLM reasoning failures, and what happens when teens lose their phones
Dear Friend,
Our dear friend and futurist par-excellence, Lisa Kay Solomon, quoted a colleague of hers at the Stanford d.school yesterday: “These days, our nervous system is nervous.” Looking at the latest World Uncertainty Index (see below), I think this might be accurate. Which begs the question: What is one to do if one’s nervous system is, well, nervous? I would argue that now, more than ever, it is paramount to practice your futuring skills while keeping things nimble and adaptive. For organizations, this is a good moment to dial up their learning skills – in a world that is constantly changing, operating in the OODA-loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is just good practice.
On the topic of “honing your futuring skills” – this week we have this for you…
Headlines from the Future
Uncertainty Hits Record High. Just when you thought, “It surely can’t get any worse,” you look at the updated World Uncertainty Index (*) data and realize, “Yes, it can!”
Uncertainty (as reported by companies around the world) has just shattered its own ceiling and is now a whopping two times higher than during the pandemic.
(*) The World Uncertainty Index (WUI) is a quantitative measure of economic and political uncertainty across 143 countries on a quarterly basis. It was developed by Hites Ahir (International Monetary Fund), Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University), and Davide Furceri (International Monetary Fund).
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To Reason or Not to Reason. Large reasoning models (LRMs) are all the rage these days. LRMs are LLMs that have been fine-tuned with incentives for step-by-step argumentation and self-verification. Every frontier model comes with at least one “reasoning” mode, and the claims by AI companies are extraordinary: “[…] with some even claiming they are capable of generalized reasoning and innovation in reasoning-intensive fields such as mathematics, physics, medicine, and law.” A new paper examined these claims, and as so often, the results are mixed:
We find that the performance of LRMs drop abruptly at sufficient complexity and do not generalize. […] We find the majority of real-world examples fall inside the LRMs’ success regime, yet the long tails expose substantial failure potential.
↗ Reasoning Models Reason Well, Until They Don’t
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Who is Brenda? This is, quite possibly, the truest thing you have heard about AI all year long…
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast?
Brenda.
Who is Brenda?
She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation and the Excel goddess herself descended from the heavens, kissed Brenda on her forehead and the sweat from Brenda’s brow is what allows us to do capitalism. [...]
She’s gonna birth that formula for a financial report and then she’s gonna send that financial report to a higher up and he’s gonna need to make a change to the report and normally he would have sent it back to Brenda but he’s like oh I have AI and AI is probably like smarter than Brenda and then the AI is gonna fuck it up real bad and he won’t be able to recognize it because he doesn’t understand Excel because AI hallucinates.
You know who’s not hallucinating?
Brenda.
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The Future of Jobs. Here are two headlines that convey how weird (and hard) it has become to navigate the world for young people entering the workforce. On one hand, you have a barrage of headlines (and data points) along the lines of “AI Is Making It Harder for Junior Developers to Get Hired.” On the other, you see creative (and maybe outright strange) behaviors such as this: “Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It’s Hiring High-School Grads.” Brave new world.
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(Un)Intended Consequences. New York banned the use of phones in schools. First, we had reporting on teens being anxious and distracted as they lost access to their digital pacifier. Now, we hear (loudly) that they are loud again – chatting at lunch with each other (what a novel concept!). Talk about the “implications of the implication” (if that reference doesn’t mean anything to you – check out our free Disruption Mapping course).
These days, lunchtime at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens is a boisterous affair, a far cry from before the smartphone ban went into effect, when most students spent their spare time scrolling and teachers said you could hear a pin drop.
“This year’s gotten way louder,” said Jimena Garcia, 15. “Sometimes I would take naps in the lunchroom, but now I can’t because of the noise. But it’s fun.”
↗ NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again
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The Whole Earth Index. This is just gorgeous! The Whole Earth Index – a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002.
What We Are Reading
🍫 I Tried Lab-Grown Chocolate. Could It Be the Future of Halloween? Scientists are growing chocolate in labs from cacao cells. A bittersweet glimpse of how technology reshapes even our sweetest indulgences. @Jane
💸 Big Tech’s A.I. Spending Is Accelerating (Again) Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are all increasing AI spending despite having already invested over $100 billion in the past three months, citing that they can’t keep up with demand and need to “catch up.” @Mafe
💡 Take Weird Ideas Seriously Following your hyper-specific niche curiosity is not just your key to differentiation as an individual; it’s part of a complex social and cultural system of innovation. @Jeffrey
📊 Finance Trends 2026: Navigating the Expanded Scope of Finance As we close in on the holidays, the annual flood of New Year predictions begins. This report is a good reminder to finance leaders: Don’t treat these just as buzz; use them as your call to action to shift from reactive number-crunching to strategic foresight. @Kacee
📱 Meet the Real Screen Addicts: the Elderly You thought kids couldn’t get their faces off their phones? Oh no, the elderly are even worse. This has some very real and concerning consequences. @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🩺 Interesting: OpenAI’s updated Usage Policies forbid the use of ChatGPT for medical and legal advice…
👾 Before we had Nintendo, we had Bertie the Brain
☎️ Are you in need of a telephone number that looks legitimate but won’t work for your next movie project? Here you go!
🍄 Shiitake mushrooms have been harnessed to function as living processors, storing and recalling data like a semiconductor chip but with almost no environmental footprint
💪🏼 Why exercise could actually save your heartbeats - not waste them
💾 The blast from the past: 1983 Floppy Disk Manual
🧠 First-ever recording of a dying human brain shows waves similar to memory flashbacks
🕵🏼♂️ Agentic AI doesn’t get a break: New prompt injection papers: Agents Rule of Two and The Attacker Moves Second
🌑 How the Mayans were able to accurately predict solar eclipses for centuries
😎 Australians to get three hours of free electricity every day under solar scheme
🍗 Chicken wings in zero gravity: China tests first-ever oven aboard space station
Pascal is spending too much time flipping through the Whole Earth Catalog from yesteryear (see link above).