"Fictional utopias are usually just that!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
We are living in the era of grand, sweeping tech utopian visions promoted by the technology titans of our time.
Yesterday, this post by Marc Andreessen - that AI would eventually lead to some sort of future nirvana where work becomes easy and where everything costs almost nothing - drew both ridicule and scorn online.
It reminds me of a post from Popular Mechanix magazine in the 1930s - we would all be working one or two hours a week because machines would be doing all the work. Right.
The thing is, these folks are on a bit of a utopian roll - there are dozens if not hundreds of grand predictions. A few months prior, Larry Ellison of Oracle suggested that AI monitoring would lead us to some type of perfect society, because, well, in the face of constant camera monitoring technology, we would all behave.
I think there was a book about that. Oh, ya, 1984 by George Orwell.
The latest, of course, involves the madman-du-jour Elon Musk, who suggests that tossing a massively complex technology known as blockchain at a massively complex challenge will prove to be a simple solution.
Right. Got that.
It's going to be a very tiresome number of years.
Some estimates suggest that as these 'tech bros', as they have become known, flex their newfound power, we are now witnessing a surge in tech-driven utopian projects. And yet, other estimates suggest these initiatives are repeating historical patterns of failure. (More leisure time, anyone?)
Why? Because they're missing the point of what it takes to achieve big goals - many things go wrong with utopian visions. Let's break it down:
- the complexity acceleration gap. the speed of change is exponential, but our solutions never are. We're seeing Silicon Valley making the same mistakes as past utopian visionaries, just with better and faster processors.
- the human nature velocity mismatch. While technology is advancing at 100 mph, human nature is still cruising at 25 mph. The hippie communes of the 1960s crashed into this reality wall - and today's crypto-utopias are heading for the same collision
- the unintended consequences accelerator. Remember the early internet utopians? They promised global democracy and got TikTok addiction instead; they promised a new form of global community and we got online hate factories. This is what happens when you ignore what I call the "chaos factor" - the exponential growth of unexpected outcomes in complex systems.
- the implementation velocity gap. It takes a massive effort to make big ideas fly, particularly in the face of big expectations with a low change velocity. It's going to be pretty funny to watch big attempts to reshape big government through grand visions that run up against bureaucratic reality.
Here's the future shock nobody's talking about: The gap between utopian vision and practical execution is widening at an exponential rate. My thinking has always been that future-ready organizations and leaders need to shift from utopian thinking to what I call "pragmatic futurism."
In other words, it's better to be realistic than not.
Sigh.
While Futurist Jim Carroll suggests that people ‘think big, start small and scale fast,’ he notes that ‘and be pragmatic’ should be the closing theme to the phrase.