Experts From a World That No Longer Exists · Collaborative Fund

What has been true for decades that will stop working, but will drag along stubborn adherents because it had such a long track record of success?

The problem with expertise is that it's entirely backward-facing. Worse, the more experience we have the more we imagine we "know" what will happen when of course we don't. Peter Drucker's maxim still holds: "The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different". With AI, the right questions to ask are "how different, how fast, and ... See more

Our own experience makes us stubborn old men about the future. We have lived through past growth rates. We’ve never lived through future growth. Therefore, it’s a lot easier for us to intuit what the future will be like by extrapolating linearly based on what we’ve actually experienced. Yes, things will be different, we all know that, but they’ll b... See more

The more static and predictable the world is, the less narrative matters. Historically most businesses followed clear precedents and fit neatly into paths. If starting a restaurant, the potential range of revenue and costs is known. There are few surprises, so it’s easier to look at the current state of the business and know what it will look like ... See more

Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is incre... See more

All the people who have achieved positions of power and authority due to prior generations of technology are now threatened by new technology.