Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future

creativity of human interaction has never been more critical. We have a huge capacity for invention—if we use it. We have limitless talent for questions and exploration—if we develop it.

This is known as the automation paradox: the skills you automate, you lose. So the more we depend on machines to think for us, the less good we become at thinking for ourselves. The fewer decisions we make, the less good we become at making them. We risk falling into a trap: more need for certainty, more dependency on technology, less skill, more n

Accepting that the future is unknowable is where action begins. Experiments are ideal for complex environments because they yield clues about where you are; they are the best thing to do when you can’t see where to start.

We have come to expect the future to be minutely and perfectly predictable. And then it rains after all, the train’s late, traffic is held up by a crash, the neighborhood is noisy, the job hateful, and the election doesn’t go our way. Trump. Brexit. The end of history. The fall of idols. A new virus. Booms and busts and out of the blue, #MeToo. The

As digital devices pervade our lives, it becomes easier to solve the so-called problem of human complexity by force-fitting a predetermined model onto human life.

We can imagine what we’ve never seen before—if we practice.

absolute certainty about all aspects of life would be tyranny. So, at a time in our history where we have huge decisions to make—about the climate, about technology, capitalism, democracy—we need our freedom, of thought and action, more than ever. In an age of uncertainty, we have to ask ourselves what we need to be, and what we need to do—and to c

If companies once expected perfect data to make consumers perfectly predictable, the fundamental uncertainty of life has deprived them of that prize. We aren’t machines—but that hasn’t stopped tech companies from trying to turn us into them.

Our choice is not between false certainty or ignorance; it is between surrender or participation. So we need to leave simple solutions behind, to be bolder in our search, more penetrating in our enquiry, more energetic in our quest for discovery.