Let Me Take You to the Future

To start out this fine March Madness Monday, I have a hypothetical situation for you: Task someone in the 1500s with enabling the instant delivery of messages between colleagues, as we do today with texts and emails.

Assuming they somehow understand your 21st century American English, I assume they’d balk at the concept. Perhaps the cleverest among them would begin devising a way wherein a letter can be delivered by high-strung cables over the rooftops, or through air-powered tubes underground, or even testing the intelligence of birds that could then be trained to deliver such items. None of them, I imagine, would ever consider that the way of the future—the way we can actually send these messages—effectively begins with the invention of a machine that is supremely adept at… computing equations.

Yes, we would tell them in their disbelief, it is the case that a machine made in the 1940s to carry out arithmetic sequences would eventually lead to the internet, which is the primary engine behind this near-instantaneous communication (I realize this analysis may be dangerously oversimplified; I’m no computer scientist).

Now, it may seem unfair, or plainly stupid, to ask this of a person who lived 500 years ago, just as it would be unfair to ask of us by what method we might one day terraform the moon. My intention in pointing out this arduous task is that the future is woefully hard to predict. The further out your prediction horizon, the more futile the effort becomes. So, if there’s any takeaway, let it be this: don’t kick yourself for not predicting market trends, innovations, geopolitical developments that, in hindsight, now seem so obvious. Consider this the next time your 2-seed champion falls to a 10-seed in the second round.

Shocking, world-changing events happen all the time. As Morgan Housel put it, “We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter.”

That’s all for today. I’ll see you one week in the future.

-John