A “futurist” is someone who has decided to trade short-term prestige for long-term ridicule. (Or would it be the other way around?)

Has anyone ever compiled the track records of these people? I know for one thing I still have to pay for electricity because the “too cheap to meter” electricity from fusion reactors is still “40 years down the road”, just like it was in 1950. And I’m still waiting for delivery on the jet pack and flying car they promised me back then too. Oh, but wait, I’m actually dead from starvation because of the “Population Bomb”. Remember that one? Paul and Ann Ehrlich, two “futurists” from Stanford University, made a bundle from writing that book in 1968.

The eternal problem with “futurists” is they can’t see anything except through the lenses of the immediate past they were brought up in and the present they inhabit. The conversations today all imagine solutions coming from big, centralized organizations, such as the ubiquitous nation-states that oppress humanity with killing machines and data collection. They’re seen as the problem, but no solutions are imagined outside of their collectivist paradigm either.

So here we have a “futurist” telling us we must create giant, centralized organizations to control this scary thing called “AI”, never even imagining that AI might itself become the solution to the over-centralized control of our lives by introducing new, decentralized ways we can organize ourselves.