How To Create The Future

Let me tell you a secret. Predicting the future is easier than you think. Consider the following quote.

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson

I recently put it up as my banner image on LinkedIn because it perfectly depicts the nature of technological advancement and progress in general. Think about this, seventeen years ago, Steve Jobs helped launch the mobile revolution which was a game changer by all means, and in less than 2 decades, we're already raising regulatory questions about autonomous machine learning models. This goes to show that technological development and progress in general is more exponential than it is linear.

The truth is that humanity has always been good at coming up with better and easier ways to do things and even if what we're seeing now wasn't happening in these current times, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

But what if I tell you that A.I isn't a 2020 phenomenon? You've been using it much longer than you realize. Every time you use Google to search for stuff, you use a type of A.I that ranks links based on what you typed in the search bar. When you use Google maps, you are actually using an A.I model that displays the most optimized route based on your current location and your specified destination. There's a whole other host of examples I can give. But what this tells you is that the majority of the times, the future happens in small pockets here and there.

The biggest reasons why most don't recognize it is because:

• It is tucked away under a layer of abstraction, such that we get used to it without realizing what's under the hood as in the case of Google search.

• It's not evenly distributed yet as in the case of ARPANET, the earliest version of the Internet, created by researchers for the military to share information before it was optimized for public use.

This is exactly why a visionary leader like Jensen Huang was able to recognize our growing reliance on A.I and went on to make a huge bet on it in 2018 by optimizing NVIDIA for the AI boom he knew was coming soon.

This is also why the legendary Steve Jobs was able to understand that the computer was not just going to be an obsession for hobbyists and computer nerds of his era but was eventually going to become the next big thing that everybody would want to use and created Apple as a result of that discovery.

It is said that the best way to predict the future is to create it, but let me go a step further; you don't have to create a novel future. Look around you, there are edge cases of advanced technology and superior best practices being used by the top companies (usually under the hood), researchers, and industry professionals in your field. Study how they do it, and see if you can replicate it on a larger scale (this is where the struggle is). And when you're able to do that, create a mechanism to make it sustainable. This is how to create the future.