The Future May Be Bright
Was there ever a time when the future wasn’t scary? Consider that 1984 was written in 1948 and Idiocracy hit theaters in 2006 and Gloom Despair and Agony in Me was sung on the Hee Haw show in 1969. All of that is modern compared to the “future is scary” story of The Last Man written in 1826 - a story about a global pandemic that wipes out humanity.
One could look at all the human travesty that has indeed occurred since 1826, including pandemics, wars, totalitarian regimes, genocide and polluting the land, air and sea.
Yet, for all our talent at predicting the end, we’ve been even better at delaying it. Since Shelley’s time, global life expectancy has more than doubled, extreme poverty has plummeted from a near-universal 90% to under 10%, and the literal light of a billion bulbs has chased away the prehistoric dark. We didn't just survive the pandemics and the smog; we mapped the genome, split the atom, and put footprints on the moon. If the past two centuries were a race between our nightmares and our ingenuity, the scoreboard shows that—despite the gloom—humanity is still winning.
What I see happening here, in this very forum, makes me hopeful that a zombie apocalypse is NOT the inevitable result of GenAI. I see people taking those first steps of productivity and finding their own boundaries. I see others filled with the joy that comes from the ability to “think a project into existence”. I have my own experience and have been a herald, but now the receipts are starting to arrive.
If there is job contraction, and there will be some, it is the increased productivity of the individual human using agentic AI tools. Empowered humans, more productive? That’s the fuel for a bright future.
We are at the very beginning. There is a learning curve individually. There is an adoption curve organizationally and for society as a whole.
The end result that I see coming is an unleashing of human creativity and productivity that will be more than a counter weight to the ills. Ills that have always been part of the human story.
The battle for a better future is evergreen. The fear of a terrible future has also ever been present.
I choose to place my bets to prepare myself for that better future.
