The fallacy of future-proofing

Speaker 1:

This is ClientSide from Fox Agency.

Speaker 3:

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Nathan Anibaba:

Amy Webb is an American futurist, author, and founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute. She is the author of several bestselling books, such as The Signals Are Talking. The Big Nine, and her latest book, The Genesis Machine. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, a non-resident senior fellow at Atlantic Council and was a 2014-15 visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Amy Webb, welcome to ClientSide.

Amy Webb:

Hey there, thanks for having me.

Nathan Anibaba:

Super excited to have you on the show. You are a South by Southwest alumni, you’ve been involved since 2005. Ben Fox, the founder of Fox Agency actually saw you speak at South By this year. And we were just all captivated. What are you most excited about when it comes to the future of technology?

Amy Webb:

At the moment, I’m excited that we still have some options in making decisions about how technology turns out. I do think that the longer that we put off making some important decisions, the less optionality we have in the future, but at the moment, I’m excited that we’re still in control of our technological destinies.

Nathan Anibaba:

You’ve got, I would say, pretty much the hardest job in the world. I don’t even know what’s happening tomorrow, let alone the future. How do you go about predicting what the future of technology looks like?

Amy Webb:

Well, I will tell you. So my background is in game theory and economics, and there is no way to predict the future. People telling you that they can predict the future, or they’ve got predictions on whatever it might be, whether that’s your horoscope, or trends, at best are approximating. And I hope they’re using a lot of data when they do that approximation. The goal isn’t predictions, it’s preparation. And you can use common sense to figure out why that makes sense. There’s so many variables in play at any given time that if we were to try to figure out what’s the future of tech, or even a narrower area of tech, like let’s say Web 3 or blockchain or whatever it might be, they’re all of these other variables over which no one entity, no company, no person, no government has total control.

Amy Webb:

And what that tells us is that things are constantly in flux. So our goal really isn’t to predict an exact future. The goal is to use data, build models, and explore plausible futures. And the point of this is to unlock our ability to think and to make decisions. So it sounds a little squishy, especially if you’ve got a background in economics or data science, but the truth is that when this is done well, and when you’re using a methodology to do the work, you really are prepared for anything. And the companies that do this, the people that do this, there are foresight departments inside of organizations. They tend to thrive and grow even when dealing with just a gross amount of deep uncertainty.

Nathan Anibaba:

You’re right. The world is so nebulous, it’s ever changing. There are so many factors, social, economic, environmental, political, that are all at play, influencing each other at the right time. It makes looking at what’s happening tomorrow nigh on impossible.

Amy Webb:

Well, I don’t know. I would push back on that. So your response is totally natural. We feel like there’s so much uncertainty that trying to look ahead feels too challenging, or maybe even pointless. I hear that all the time. I know that’s not what you think, but I hear it all the time. I actually heard a chief executive [inaudible 00:04:08] enormous global company yesterday tell me that for them, there’s just no point in doing a forecast that’s more than five years out because that is so far in the future. And my response was, “Listen, you are the one in the organization that needs to be willing to go out farther. Because if you are not working in that farther future horizon, somebody else is. It’s either going to be an incumbent or it’s going to be a startup or a disruptor, and they are going to drag you in to the future as they’ve defined it. And then you lose leverage and you’re going to have to play by their rules.”

Amy Webb:

So people who work in foresight think about time differently than others. For me, these numbers are to some degree arbitrary, unless they’re tied to a board of directors governance structure or an internal financial structure. You have to be willing to go further out. 20 years, even, because some of these huge systems that are in flux will take time to sort out. And if you’re not willing to go deeper into the future to at least investigate and try to pull data where you can, you’re really doing, I think, a disservice to yourself and your organization.

Nathan Anibaba:

And you’re right. The people that are able to do that are the people who are able to create the future that we’re living in right now. I mean, Reed Hoffman, go back and look at the Blockbuster example. There have been a ton of examples where founders and CEOs have been able to predict where the puck is going to be in five, 10 years, 20 years time. What’s your framework for thinking about how to do that?

Amy Webb:

Yeah. And again, I know it sounds… For me, prediction is a super nasty word. And let me tell you why. Because if I have the right data and it’s narrow, I can predict something. If I have a big data set and I have limited variables, I could predict the outcome of something. So we know that’s plausible. I mean, to some degree, that’s that’s the root of artificial intelligence as it exists. What I’m trying to introduce is with so many things in flux, I think what Reed has done really well is not predict that 20 years ago that everything would be cloud based, but rather creating a vision, given what we know to be true today, this is what I see as a plausible option on the horizon. And if that’s true, here’s my vision, my north star, this is where I’m going to head.

Amy Webb:

And I think that was true of Jeff Bezos, who I think is one of the most preeminent best future thinkers that exists, that is alive today, that has perhaps ever been alive. It’s true of Reed and others but it’s not like they went 20 years ago and said the future is going to be ubiquitous connectivity, low latency, high bandwidth, the cloud. I think it’s more like… It seems like this area is ripe for disruption because it hasn’t changed. And there are all of these inflection points that are coming that are the result of emerging technologies.

Amy Webb:

So I think it’s a little bit more nuanced and you’re right. So Blockbuster is a great example. And at the time, if you had told people, you don’t have to go into a physical store, you’re going to get a DVD in the mail and you can keep it for as long as you want, and there’s no late fees and you can pre reserve things that you want to watch and they will automatically show up. That doesn’t sound all that groundbreaking, but it was such a huge departure from what the existing incumbents had been doing. That was the innovation. And then being able to incrementally improve and change things as they went along.

Amy Webb:

Now, Netflix is having problems. Netflix subscribers for the first time have started to go in the other direction, which is a sign that there are competing influences. There are certainly the streaming market is saturated. So this is why I highlight it because sometimes the most tech forward thinkers and the most tech forward companies become vulnerable because they stop aggressively looking for that external disruption. My point in saying this is you have to commit to continually tracking signals, no matter how successful your company is. You could be the best B2B tech company on the planet. You could still get disrupted no matter what your market cap is, no matter what your margins are or your revenue is, or how amazing your tech is. You have to constantly commit to tracking signals and taking action when action is warranted.

Nathan Anibaba:

You give advice to leaders about how to think about protecting their business in the future. And you actually say, quote, “There’s no such thing as future-proofing.” Explain.

Amy Webb:

Yeah. So again, that’s another one of these to me, gobbledygook made up very comforting sounding promises. If you just do-

Nathan Anibaba:

Just future-proof your business.

Amy Webb:

Exactly. Exactly. You and I will just do that for you over the weekend. I hate that term. I hate the term “future-proofing” because A, it’s completely false. There’s no way to do it, but B it sets up bad expectations inside of an organization. So if you have a future-proofed strategy, or if this is a word, it’s a phrase that is being used internally in your organization, the implications are, if I do A, B will follow. And the example that I love to give on this one has to driving a car in slippery conditions. So I grew up in part of the United States that has a lot of snow on the south side of Chicago. If you’ve ever driven on ice, one of the things that you are taught, and not everybody is taught to do this, but one of the things that you’re taught to do is if you start slipping, you’re not supposed to slam on your brakes.

Amy Webb:

Now, if you’ve been in a car that starts sliding out of control, biologically, that is what your instinct tells you to do. Slam on the brakes and everything will be fine. That is a physical form showing the fallacy of future-proofing. If A, then B. If I slam on my brakes, my car will stop. So what would it take for that to be true? You would have to know every single data point for the entire road around you. You would have to know the exact gradient, the exact tread. You would have to know the pressure on all of your tires. You would have to have all of these data and you would have to be a walking supercomputer who was capable of computing every single plausible outcome with every single variable. And you would have to have lightning… You would have to stop time.

Amy Webb:

You would basically have to be Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen. But this is great analogy I think for the challenges that so many businesses face. They believe that they are in total control. They don’t want to sit with uncertainty. Most people don’t want to sit with uncertainty, but uncertainty is what we have. And if you can get comfortably uncomfortable managing through uncertainty with a more incremental approach, then you avoid the crash. So what are you supposed to do when you slip on ice? Something that feels really weird. You’re not supposed to slam on your brakes. You’re supposed to steer into the slide while keeping your eyes pretty far ahead. So you have to keep your eyes ahead on the road while making super fast decisions as you’re steering into that uncertainty. It feels weird. Your body doesn’t want to do it, but what are we actually doing? We’re doing the things that make up Doctor Manhattan to the best that we can.

Amy Webb:

We are actually slowing down time by doing that. We are thinking very long term, far ahead and immediate term simultaneously. And we’re being, not reactive, although we’re reacting to some degree, we’re being proactive, we’re being super incremental. Because we’re constantly changing what we’re doing, but keeping our eye on that farther future. That’s what’s required. You can’t future-proof. What you can do is steer into the slide, which means getting comfortable with deep uncertainty. It doesn’t mean leading with instinct or constantly firing from your gut. It means being much more pragmatic. It’s just for businesses that figure out how to do this. And there is a way to do it. Again, they tend to survive and thrive. The businesses that don’t do that, and the leaders that feel a continued sense of FOMO, fear of missing out, so they’re making snap decisions or they’re being super reactive, or they’re just slamming their foot on the brake over and over again. That makes them vulnerable. And they usually don’t it until it’s too late.

Nathan Anibaba:

I want to talk about your new book, The Genesis Machine. But before we do that, let’s talk a little bit about how you thought about the future of technology over the last few years. So things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars, bio hacking, bots, internet of things, how those things affect us personally, and what predictions of those have come true since you initially started talking about them way back in 2009 and which ones haven’t come to fruition, I’m just interested on your thoughts on that.

Amy Webb:

So I founded my company, which is called the Future Today Institute in 2006. And since then we have used a data driven approach with a pretty rigorous model and set of frameworks to identify longitudinal trends. And this process is pretty involved and requires lots of different steps. What we’re trying to do is figure out what are the long term forces at play. Trends have to meet. First of all, there’s a whole process to even qualify what a trend is in our world. And then they have to meet a certain set of criteria, but those criteria demonstrate some type of long term movement into the future. So throughout our company’s history, we’ve been tracking around 600 or so of these really long term science and technology trends. They tend to evolve as they emerge. But they’re never flashes in the pan. So if you remember Foursquare, which feels like a lifetime ago.

Nathan Anibaba:

That’s around 2009, I think.

Amy Webb:

But like a billion years ago, earlier humans used their cell phones to check in to places like South by Southwest, and you would get a digital badge. And there was one South By, it might have been 2009, I think. Because yeah, Twitter would’ve been ’06. Somewhere around there. So there was Foursquare, Gowalla, and SVCNGR. Nobody used SCVNGR, it had no vowels in the name. But they were all jockeying for the top of the heap with social badging and check-ins. Now, the badges are what everybody fixated on. That was the obvious stuff. And so everybody from that point forward thought that there was going to be this gamification layer that was going to power everything we did going forward. A decade ago, gamification was the metaverse. I mean, not specifically related to the tech, but in terms of the hype. That’s all anybody was talking about. What mattered wasn’t the badge, what mattered was location aware services that were more automated, that brought people information from the space that they were in and allowed them to connect in different ways, which is a jumble of words.

Amy Webb:

So it doesn’t sound very trendy. And that’s the point. The challenge with all of these technologies is distilling what is the signal that matters from what’s the noise. What’s the real trend here? And so I would say today and somewhat ironically at South By this year, there was some companies, because metaverse, Web 3, NFTs were big. There was a company that was offering proof of attendance. So it’s a blockchain backed way of proving that you were at an event. So you could get a badge that was irrevocable… It was a hexagon. That proved that you were in this place. And everybody was like, “This is the future.” And I’m like, “No, this is the past. Literally.”

Nathan Anibaba:

We’ve done this.

Amy Webb:

We literally did this a decade ago. Anyhow. So I mean that’s the challenge here now in terms of what we’ve been looking at. I don’t think we’ve really gotten things wrong. We’ve gotten the timing a little off because some of these inflection… The calculating the velocity and the trajectory of these things is a little hard.

Amy Webb:

We thought that NFTs would be in much wider… Or not NFT, sorry, NFC. Near-field communication. That that was going to be in mobile devices. We were a year off on that. And that that would be in widespread use and have all of these other effects. We thought that QR codes and 2D barcoding would’ve had wider acceptance in Europe and the US and it really didn’t take off until COVID. So sometimes we get the inflections wrong and again, that just proves my point that there is no way to make an accurate prediction. Because the timing is always going to be a little bit of a challenge on these things.

Nathan Anibaba:

That’s super interesting. So it’s not so much that we got the prediction wrong. It’s just that the timing was a little bit out. And to that point, we can still be right about so many different things, but it’s just about our time horizon. That’s a super fascinating point. Let’s talk a little bit about your new book, The Genesis Machine. It’s a fascinating book. It’s all about synthetic biology and biochemistry and how that’s going to revolutionize the way we think about disease and aging and how we nourish ourselves. Super fascinating field, super complicated field as well. On the plus side, we can do things like feed humanity forever and ever, and solve climate change. On the downside, it can wipe out human beings from the face of the planet, if we’re not careful. Should we start messing with it?

Amy Webb:

So this is a relatively new field that combines computer science with engineering and design and biology. And the point of this field, which is called synthetic biology, is to enable and empower scientists to reprogram cells, to basically give them new, better augmented abilities. It also is starting to mean creating new life forms that never existed before. And in fact, that has already happened. Now, I’m not talking about a walking, talking monster that’s like an alien that’s going to come down the street. At the moment, the work is trying to produce the minimum viable genome. So the very smallest organism that still functions. This work is really important because it starts to give us optionality. So for those who are again, B2B, you’re in the B2B space, you’re thinking about tech, you’re thinking about business.

Amy Webb:

Why should the future of biology matter? This stuff sounds like an outlier. It’s actually not. So if you think about raw materials, like nylon. Nylon is in a ton of stuff that we use. It’s everywhere. You don’t really realize it. Nylon is produced from a molecule that comes from petroleum. So the way that our global supply chains now work and so many companies are trying to increase their margins and reduce waste. What you wind up with are many single points of failure in those supply chains. That explains why so many parts of the supply chain are broken right now. Well, if we continue to have petroleum dependence on just a couple of players and those players wind up embroiled in geopolitical conflict, AKA what’s happening right now with Russia, that constricts access to the molecule that’s required to make nylon.

Amy Webb:

So one really cool application of this technology is creating that molecule using a different process. So getting yeast to produce sugar in a way that you can create the same molecule from a programmable biology rather than petroleum. So that’s already being done. Now, it’s not done at scale super cheaply yet, but again, we’re at the beginning stages of this. But my point here is that it just gives us optionality. We could produce nylon in a way that is far less harmful to the planet and can break down more easily. This gives us things like self-healing paints. It gives us better, different ways to grow produce, to grow meat without needing livestock, things like that.

Nathan Anibaba:

So it’s a super fascinating field and I’m sure it’s an area that’s going to grow and grow. There’s a huge amount of VC money that’s going into this field right now. The challenge though, is that a lot of the tech money that’s going into this isn’t really smart money. And by that I mean a lot of the investors themselves aren’t scientists, they don’t come from a physics or a chemistry background. So a lot of the time they’re making decisions that on the face of it sound quite smart, but actually might end up being quite foolhardy. I’m thinking a little bit about Elizabeth Holmes here and the issues that she got involved in. So talk to me a little bit about what the future of this field looks like, given the fact that there’s so much uncertainty and there’s a lot of domain knowledge and expertise that needs to be brought to bear here in order to bring this to reality.

Amy Webb:

So again, I think there, there are some parallels here between what’s happening in SynBio and what’s happening in AI. These are very long horizon technologies, which means there’s going to be a lot happening over decades. And at times there will be faster inflections. And at times it’ll feel like things are just taking forever. AI’s ecosystem is maturing, not fully mature yet. And synthetic biology’s ecosystem is just getting started. This matters because in the 1980s, there were so many promises made in the 15 years after the term “artificial intelligence” was coined during a summer workshop at Dartmouth. And the people who were there became media celebrities in their own right at that point. There was so much hype, so much excitement, so many expectations that just could not be met because… I mean, one of the promises that was made back then was that there would be a computer that could simultaneously translate any language into English.

Amy Webb:

I love Star Trek. I am a Trekkie. I love Star Trek, but I’m also aware of given our level of compute what’s plausible. And at that point, a simultaneous translation machine… Computers were the size of rooms. There wasn’t the compute yet, let alone all the other stuff that had to go along with it. So what ensued was a winter. The AI winter, where funding dried up, projects dried up, and there were lots of problems and it took a very long time for it to bounce back into the other direction. I worry that the same could be true of synthetic biology. This is a strange field. There is some hype, there are maturing investors who are very excited about the prospect of expanding lifespans, dealing with telomeres, all of the things that aging.

Amy Webb:

And so they’re throwing just a lot of money in and because the messenger RNA vaccine was derived using some of this technology. There’s now a lot of excitement around what else could be done. So I just don’t want to see a similar situation where there’s just piles and piles of money getting thrown into this and investors get impatient and want to see products right away. I worry that that is to some degree what’s happening with the DeepMind team. They are doing basic research and there are plenty of examples of it. DeepMind’s parent company, which is Alphabet, really needing to have sellable products coming out of that division. I don’t know that that’s the right way to be thinking about what that… They’re one of the world’s greatest research teams. I feel like let them hunker down, figure out what’s next.

Nathan Anibaba:

Let them do what they do.

Amy Webb:

And do risk assessments all along the way. Let’s not do that at the end, but this rush to productize and rush to monetize is a perpetual issue. And that is one concern that I have for SymBio. For individual investors, you got to get educated and make sure that you’re backing the right horse. Right now, the horses to back is the infrastructure. Because in the United States and elsewhere around the world, processes are less regulated than products. Products are easy to spot. They make sense. We sort of [inaudible 00:25:43] them. The processes are pretty boring. But that’s where the development is right now.

Nathan Anibaba:

What’s the one idea you hope listeners will take away from the book?

Amy Webb:

We didn’t really get into some of the truly existential changes. This technology will, at some point, introduce human enhancement. Not tomorrow, but at some point in the future, it will give us the ability to enhance our cognition, cognitive abilities. It could give us the ability to be taller, to have different types of features. And the bottom line is that there are some countries around the world that have values different than others who are going to proceed with experimentation and others who don’t. And I just think we need to be prepared to have meaningful, thoughtful conversations. My biggest fear of all of this is that we don’t have the conversation now. And when it comes time to have that conversation, it’ll be under duress. And at that point it’ll be polarized, politicized, too late to really do anything.

Nathan Anibaba:

So aside from that, to end on a positive, there are lots of positive applications off the back of this. Imagine if we do get our house in order, I love the way that you phrased it. There are other countries that have different values than as… To say the least. But there’s huge potential upside here. If we get this right, if we come together in terms of longevity, in terms of… There are so many human indices and metrics that we can improve if we get this right. So just riff a little bit on that before we finish.

Amy Webb:

Yeah. I mean, if we want to live long and prosper, we’re going to need this tech. That’s the bottom line. We are not going to solve our climate challenges at the current rate. We are going to face a global food shortage worse than the one that we have now. We will face extreme weather events. We have problems ahead. And so if it is our goal, as a species, to live long and prosper, we need some help. And synthetic biology, I think, offers us some help, both on this planet and in galaxies far, far away. I hope I’m not taking the metaphor too far. But the way that we’re consuming… There’s a lot of talk about getting humans into space and living on Mars. And there’s a lot of argument about whether or not that’s even possible.

Amy Webb:

What if we augmented ourselves and we created Martians? I mean, we figured out a way to augment the genome so that we could survive more easily in a place like Mars or Kepler-16b or pick some place. If we reorient ourselves toward a future where synthetic biology opens up optionality, and then we’re really not hamstrung by today’s tech or even today’s thinking. And I think that’s awesome. I think that is… If we can allow ourselves to let our minds wander productively a little bit, then I think honestly, we could do so many great things, but we just have to do some planning and come to terms with what this means and be willing to collaborate.

Nathan Anibaba:

That’s a great place to end, Amy. Thank you so much for doing this.

Amy Webb:

You got it. Thank you.

Nathan Anibaba:

If you’d like to share any comments on this episode or any episode of ClientSide, then find us online at Fox Star Agency. If you’d like to appear as a guest on the show, then please email clientside@foxstaragency. The people that make this show possible are Zoey Woodward, our executive producer. Hannah Teasdale is our podcast executive. Jennifer Brennan is our digital strategist supported by Sofia Ravanis and Alice Winterburn, our social and digital experts. I’m Nathan Anibaba. You’ve been listening to ClientSide from Fox Agency.

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