By Futurist Thomas Frey
Someone recently did something to my work that I have never done to it myself.
They read across hundreds of my columns — the pieces on AI and automation, the robotics and neural interface writing, the series on driverless vehicles and the future of work and maximum curiosity — and they looked for the underlying structure. Not the predictions, which change with new information, but the principles beneath the predictions. The rules that kept reappearing regardless of the topic. The statements about how the future actually unfolds rather than merely what it will contain.
Then they handed me a list of five of them.
I want to be honest about what that experience was like. It was unsettling in the way that looking at an X-ray of your own hand is unsettling — you recognize the thing immediately as yours, you can see the structure you carry around inside without usually thinking about it, and the familiarity and the strangeness arrive simultaneously. These were ideas I had written in some form hundreds of times. I had never seen them laid out beside each other as a set.
I am going to share them here, with some additional thinking, because I believe they matter — not as a monument to my own work, but because if they are accurate descriptions of how the future moves, they are useful to anyone trying to navigate what is coming.
Continue reading… “The Laws I Didn’t Know I Was Writing”