Escaping the Futurist Trap, a sort of keynote, questioning keynotes

It’s been a while since I did a bit of an audio thing on here, so I thought it might be nice to reflect on a talk I got invited to do at Digital Day, hosted by the AdClub of Toronto. They asked me to speak not about the far-flung, sci-fi futurism stuff of humanoid robots, metaverses, hyperloops and AI everywhere, but the very real ones we could be building right now. So I used the time, and this follow-up, to unpack why we’re so bad at starting the future, even when we already have the tools.

The Problem With Futurism

Futurism has become theatre. There, I said it. And lots of my friends are brilliant futurists and professional keynote speakers.

It’s over a decade since I first used a VR headset in a corporate setting, and today, only the graphics really seem to have got better, rather than the things becoming much more useful beyond some very interesting niche, usually industrial settings. Hype-er-loop has distracted us from high speed rail. Elon was exposed for the fakery of his humanoid robots. Anyone remember that brief flirtation with the metaverse?

The result is it all feels too far away and people leave briefly inspired but ultimately inert. Monday rolls around and they’re back in the same meetings, just with more ambient guilt.

We’re paralysed by the big stuff. The big visions make us think we need to wait from them to be attainable. Which is ironic, because most great futures start as quite ugly little things.

The Futures are Already Here, We Just Ignore Them

We’ve got the tools, but we don’t make the most of them. Microsoft Excel is a good metaphor, for most people use 10% of its power, then get distracted by the allure of shinier SaaS platforms when they already had the tool in their hands. It’s not so much a tech problem, but a systems one. And systems problems don’t get solved with glossy strategy decks, or usually by people calling themselves ‘systems thinkers’ … they get solved with ... curiosity, courage, persistence and the momentum that creates, also knowing which piece of infrastructure a 73-year-old in Nebraska, one of a few in the world who still knows the old code, is still thanklessly maintaining so the system doesn’t crash.

Newark Airport in 2025 is the physical manifestation of this kind of problem.