Welcome Tomorrow

Last month genuinely shocked me.

With all the new developments in artificial intelligence, this is the first time we can actually feel the exponential nature of technical progress.

This is absolutely exciting. It means that we are living in the future.

But it’s also rather creepy. It means that things will change – a lot.

And the rate of change will only increase*. We will make as much progress this year as in the last ten years combined.

I’ve been in a kind of stupor for the last few days after learning about the new AI stuff. It made me ponder over the implications this will have for me and my life.

My first response was primarily fear – I started fearing that my current job will be made obsolete, and thus rob me of the economic security I’m enjoying right now.

I find that very frightening.

But I had to realize that worrying is not the answer. If you think about it, the future was already highly uncertain anyway. So fundamentally, nothing has changed.

We cannot look into the future. But we can influence it by focussing on what we can do now.

To help us decide, we can look back and plan ahead. Those are the best tools to respond to uncertainty and our changing environment.

So how are you gonna respond?

[*] Absolutely worthwhile classic by Ray Kurzweil called “The Law of Accelerating Returns”, published in 2001 (!!)

This is an excerpt of a post on Mental Garden, a regular newsletter designed to help you become a better human through guided introspections. Read the full post and sign up now.