DeepSeek anyone................?

 

At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam, this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves how little we know about the present and how completely unexpected events can be in the future.

-Barry Ritholtz, from here

Certain......................

 

I will never be certain about the future. I’ve read too much about the past to be confident about the future. History is full of unpredictable events so the only thing I am confident about is that the future will be full of them too.

-more certainty here

play.......................

 

. . . if you can play with the horizon of the future, you are indeed doing well.

-Jordan B. Peterson

Be careful out there.....................

 No power on earth is more fearsome than a highly educated class that faces a constrained, even dismal, future. 

-Joel Kotkin, as he starts this entry

about those expectations...........

 

In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. . . .

    This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love.  When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.  A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.  He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Figuring out the future..................................

 

.................................is difficult at best.

A fact.............................

 

............................................multiplied by a story.

Pretty sure we aren't there yet.........

      Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event.  Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically."  Today, unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate.  Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself.  Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need.  Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.

-Alvin Toffler, from his 1970 classic, Future Shock

no nirvana-like un-change...................

 

How do we know that change is accelerating?  There is, after all, no absolute way to measure change.  In the awesome complexity of the universe, even within any given society, a virtually infinite number of steams of change occur simultaneously.  All "things"—from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy—are, in reality, not things at all, but processes.  There is no static point, no nirvana-like un-change, against which to measure change. 

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

dizzying.............................

 

Yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock.  Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)

Opening paragraphs.................

 In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically sound people will face an abrupt collision with the future.  Citizen of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time.  For them, the future will have arrived too soon.

-Alvin Toffler,  Future Shock (1970)

Ed. note:  first read this book about fifty years ago.  Young Brandon handed me a new copy of it today, thinking I might find value in it.  Early returns say he was correct.

About those plans................

      Adams would proudly claim that he never troubled himself with plans for his future.  All evidence corroborates that approach, one not everyone could afford.

-Stacy Schiff,  The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

the constitutive uncertainty................

 Fatih is the human response to the phenomenon that defines the human condition: the constitutive uncertainty of our lives as we walk towards the undiscovered country called the future.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

The unknowable future.........

 Are stock prices too high? I don’t know, and neither do you. I am too much of an Efficient Markets adherent to believe otherwise. Though, I am also Schumpeterian. So, yeah, we just may be in a new AI-powered economy where we will be much more productive, and the firms best poised to make money off this are worth a lot—and will be worth much more than what they are now. But until we figure many things out, and that could take decades (possibly many decades), there will be some froth along the way. We will make big bets on the wrong horses. Or some companies that seem poised for greatness will falter after a while. Or companies that seem unstoppable now may not exist then. Who the winners will be and what winning even looks like is unknowable right now.

-Allison Schrager

ignored.........................

So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

-Eric Arthur Blair, channeling George Orwell

more fun here

A good practice..................

 I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for 50 years. Two years later, we were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since refrained from all prediction.

-Wilber Wright, as quoted here

story telling....................

Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever 

Opening paragraphs...................

      What happens in ordinary moments determines your future.

-Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking

Predictions are hard.....................

 ......................especially about the future:

A master-of-the-universe mentality is pervasive in finance because it’s a group of highly educated, competitive people. They see it as a sign of weakness if you admit you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

The problem is finance people (all people, really) are very good at telling you why something that just happened was obvious in hindsight. They are terrible at telling you what will happen in the future.

-Ben Carlson, from this post

Beating up on Malthus.....................

     Malthus had quite accurately foretold the one phenomenon [population explosion], but had missed the other altogether [productivity increases].  Why? Because of the systematic pessimistic bias to which prophecy is prone. . . . They all thought they were making sober predictions based on the best knowledge that was available to them.  In reality they were all allowing themselves to be misled by the ineluctable fact of the human condition that we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity