WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly

WTF? Google AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program, beat the world’s best human Go player, an event that was widely predicted to be at least twenty years in the future—until it happened in 2016. If AlphaGo can happen twenty years early, what else might hit us even sooner than we expect? For starters: An AI running on a $35 Raspberry Pi computer beat a top US Air Force fighter pilot trainer in combat simulation. The world’s largest hedge fund has announced that it wants an AI to make three-fourths of management decisions, including hiring and firing. Oxford University researchers estimate that up to 47% of human tasks, including many components of white-collar jobs, may be done by machines within as little as twenty years.

What do AI, self-driving cars, on-demand services, and income inequality have in common? They are telling us, loud and clear, that we’re in for massive changes in work, business, and the economy.

We saw that radically new industries don’t start when creative entrepreneurs meet venture capitalists. They start with people who are infatuated with seemingly impossible futures.

We forget. We forget quickly. And we forget ever more quickly as the pace of innovation increases.

So what makes a real unicorn of this amazing kind? 1. It seems unbelievable at first. 2. It changes the way the world works. 3. It results in an ecosystem of new services, jobs, business models, and industries.

And that gets me to the third characteristic of true unicorns: They create value. Not just financial value, but real-world value for society.

This is the true opportunity of technology: It extends human capability.

“My grandfather wouldn’t recognize what I do as work.”

Top US CEOs now earn 373x the income of the average worker, up from 42x in 1980. As a result of the choices we’ve made as a society about how to share the benefits of economic growth and technological productivity gains, the gulf between the top and the bottom has widened enormously, and the middle has largely disappeared.

In business and in technology, we often fail to see clearly what is ahead because we are navigating using old maps and sometimes even bad maps—maps that leave out critical details about our environment or perhaps even actively misrepresent it.

That’s another lesson about the future. It doesn’t just happen. People make it happen. Individual decisions matter.

It is almost always the case that if you want to see the future, you have to look not at the technologies offered by the mainstream but by the innovators out at the fringes.

The lesson is clear: Treat curiosity and wonder as a guide to the future. That sense of wonder may just mean that those crazy enthusiasts are seeing something that you don’t . . . yet.

How can a business create more value for society than it captures for itself?

This is a key lesson in how to see the future: bring people together who are already living in it. Science fiction writer William Gibson famously observed, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” The early developers of Linux and the Internet were already living in a future that was on its way to the wider world. Bringing them together was the first step in redrawing the map.

Train yourself to recognize when you are looking at the map instead of at the road. Constantly compare the two and pay special attention to all the things you see that are missing from the map.

Your map should be an aid to seeing, not a replacement for it.

language itself was a kind of map. Language shapes what we are able to see and how we see it.

Language can also lead us astray. Korzybski was fond of showing people how words shaped their experience of the world. In one famous anecdote, he shared a tin of biscuits wrapped in brown paper with his class. As everyone munched on the biscuits, some taking seconds, he tore off the paper, showing that he’d passed out dog biscuits.

Recognizing when you’re stuck in the words, looking at the map rather than looking at the road, is something that is surprisingly hard to learn. The key is to remember that this is an experiential practice. You can’t just read about it. You have to practice it.

This is my next lesson. If the future is here, but just not evenly distributed yet, find seeds of that future, study them, and ask yourself how things will be different when they are the new normal. What happens if this trend keeps going?

The way you view the world limits what you can see.

Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, had developed a framework that explained what I was observing. In a 2004 article in Harvard Business Review, he articulated “the law of conservation of attractive profits” as follows: “When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

Remember, putting the right pieces of the puzzle on the table is the first step toward assembling them into a coherent picture.

I didn’t predict the future. I drew a map of the present that identified the forces shaping the technology and business landscape.

The term network effect generally refers to systems that gain in utility the more people use them. A single telephone is not very useful, but once enough people have them, it is very hard not to join the network. So too, the competition in social networks has been to assemble massive user bases, because the lock-in is not via software but through the number of other people using the same service.

Today’s software is developed by watching what users do in real time—with A/B testing of features on subsets of users, measurement of what works and what doesn’t work informing development on an ongoing basis. In this way, the collaborative model of open source software development—“given enough eyeballs, all bugs become shallow”—has been taken to its logical conclusion, and completely divorced from the original licensing model of free and open source software. In the end, I was able to see the future more clearly because my map was more useful than one based on a battle between proprietary software and free software licensing models. Having the right orientation matters. But even then, it had taken years to explore the landscape sufficiently to fill in all the blank spaces on the map.

The future is the outcome of millions of intersecting vectors, which add up in unexpected ways. The art is to pick out important vectors and weave a net from them in which to catch a view of the future.

“global consciousness is that thing that decided that decaffeinated coffeepots should be orange.” The idea that “orange means decaffeinated” originated during World War II, when Sanka promoted its decaffeinated coffee brand by giving away orange-rimmed coffeepots to restaurants across America. The idea took hold—not universally, to be sure, but sufficiently that the pattern propagates. At some point, it no longer belonged to Sanka but to the world.

The association of “orange” with “decaffeinated” is an example of what Richard Dawkins called a “meme”—a self-replicating idea.

Today people often think of memes as images and slogans shared on social media, but any great idea that takes hold is a meme. In 1880, “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley wrote, “The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its r...

The kinds of “thoughts” that a global brain has are different from those of an individual, or of a less connected society. At their best, these thoughts allow for coordinated memory on a scale never seen before, and sometimes even for unforeseen ingenuity and new forms of cooperation; at their worst, they allow for the adoption of misinformation as truth, for corrosive attacks on the fabric of society as one portion of the network seeks advantage at the expense of others (think of spam and fraud, or of the behavior of financial markets in recent decades, or of the rash of fake news sites during the 2016 US presidential election).

Self-driving cars are a manifestation of the global brain; their memory is the memory of roads traveled under the tutelage of human drivers but recorded with their uncanny senses. But not unsurprisingly, the most powerful manifestation of the global brain’s ability to touch the physical world relies not on robots but on the power of networked applications to direct human activity.

There is usually a paradigmatic company or group of companies that best exemplifies the next wave of technology. “Unpacking” the lessons of that company can help you draw your map of the future.

It is easy to forget that many of the people who invent the future do so by crashing through barriers, crushing competitors, and dominating a new industry by force of will as well as intellect. Sometimes dirty tricks come into play. Thomas Edison and John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, were all justifiably reviled at various points in their careers. When I began my work in computing, Microsoft was routinely referred to as “the Evil Empire.”

MAKING STRATEGIC CHOICES You can tell if a business model map is good if it helps a company to make sound strategic choices. That is, it frames the problem in such a way that a company can make conscious choices about what’s important, rather than discovering too late that it broke a key part of what had made it successful.

When making sense of the future, think in terms of gravitational cores, not hard boundaries. Just as the sun’s gravity well reaches out beyond the orbit of Pluto and encompasses not just the planets in the ecliptic but comets and planetoids with eccentric orbits, so too the forces shaping the future all have a gravitational core and a gradually attenuating influence. And just as the solar system has multiple gravitational subsystems, where the draw of the local giant keeps its own satellites in tow while all still partake in the larger dance, these interpenetrating trends influence each other and converge.

When you hear a new concept like this, succinctly stated, add it to your mental toolbox. Try it on as a way of seeing the world around you. How does it help you think differently?

To make the future economy better than the present, find new ways to augment workers, giving them new skills and access to new opportunities. As we automate something that humans used to do, how can we augment them so that they can do something newly valuable?

When trying to map the future, remember that the territory is not an idealized landscape, but a real one, full of contradiction. The people who are creating the future are complex, each with a mix of brilliance and flaws. They see some things we don’t, and are blind to others.

Steve Jobs, who was a master at throwing that door wide open, said, “When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is. . . . Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it. . . . Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

When you draw a new map successfully enough, you change the perception not only of the future but of the past. That thing that seemed unthinkable becomes the fabric of the everyday, and it’s hard to remember that it once was only one of many possibilities.

Frank Herbert once told me, “Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s implementation that matters.” The future isn’t just imagined. It is built.

People are comfortable with what they’re doing, and they don’t see the future coming at them.

Keep waiting for the missing pieces of the puzzle to arrive. Even if you aren’t the one to push that boundary, once someone does it successfully, there’s a huge opportunity for a fast follower. Be ready!

Understanding that what used to be hard is now free and easy due to the work of others is essential to the leapfrogging progress of technology.

Real breakthroughs come when an entrepreneur doesn’t just use new technology to duplicate what went before or to fine-tune the way the world works now, but to reimagine how it ought to work.

When the past is everything you know, it is hard to see the future.

Often what keeps us from recognizing what lies before us is a kind of afterimage, superimposed on our vision even after the stimulus is gone. Afterimages occur when photoreceptors are overstimulated because you look too long at an object without the small movements (saccades) that refresh the vision, leading to a decrease in the signal to the brain. Or they may occur because your eyes are compensating for bright light, and then you suddenly move into darkness. So too, if we wrap ourselves in the familiar without exposing our minds to fresh ideas, images are burned onto our brains, leaving shadows of the past overlaid on the present. Familiar companies, technologies, ideas, and social structures hide others with a vastly dissimilar structure, and we see only ghostly images until the new comes into focus. Once your eyes have adjusted to the new light, you see what was previously invisible to you.

This is a central pattern of the Internet age: More freedom leads to more growth.