The Future is Fuzzy

"In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY."

Elon Musk - Jan 10, 2016

Ten years after what has proven to be one of many false predictions from the Tesla boss, and you cannot summon your Tesla to come and get you from across the country. In fact, its ability to come and get you from across the car park is under investigation by the US authorities after multiple accident reports.

How long might it be until you can actually summon your Tesla from across the country? It might be another decade, and more likely two, I suspect, once all the technical, legal, financial and regulatory challenges to such an idea have been overcome.

This doesn’t stop lots of people from believing that a true self-driving car - technically known as a Class 5 autonomous vehicle, but practically one that can fulfil Musk’s ambition - is just around the corner. So when I project their adoption by consumers as a novelty for the 2040s or 2050s, sometimes people think I’m out of touch with what’s happening, or just not trying very hard.

Smart Glasses?

There are parallel examples in lots of fields. Smart glasses, for example, have been all the rage at CES this year. Industry titles are talking about 2026 being the year of their breakthrough. But are any of the people you know (who aren’t nerds or content creators) excited about swapping their smartphones for smart glasses right now? I believe we will, ultimately, but I think there’s still a lot of work to be done, most critically on the user interface. The best smart glasses now are like some of my early smartphones*. Brilliant for their time but maybe not yet ready for 6bn people to adopt them. So if I’m doing future scenarios, universal smart glass use is a few years out, not on this horizon.

Likewise the 3D-printed organs I featured in the recent project with Zurich. We can print lots of biological things now - notably as of the middle of 2025, skin for burn victims. But we can’t yet print complex organs. This is still a couple of decades away. If you don’t understand the difference, it seems like an odd thing to be a ‘prediction’.

AI Accelerator

None of this is helped by the fact that AI has made the rate of advancement rather unpredictable. We just don’t know yet how much it might contribute to the acceleration of drug discovery, or materials science, or any other innovation endeavour. The result is that even in an age of unparalleled access to information and computational power, the future is fuzzier than ever. And at the same time, any and all prognostications are subject to great challenge and criticism, because people have just enough knowledge to challenge and criticise.

I notice this in almost every project now. Where even a couple of years ago, the challenge tended to be “that seems too fantastical/not plausible“ today it’s as likely or even more likely to be “isn’t that already true/available?“ This stretches beyond the technological domain. I’ve seen examples in projects on the future of work, food and culture where the issue is fundamentally similar. Something emerges from our foresight exercise. I qualify it, looking around at data, debate, behaviour. But because something like it has been discussed/claimed by someone in the client’s sphere, they think it might be passé. When in reality, it has never gone beyond claims and statements and might be decades from reality.

Audiences and Action

The extent to which I push back on these challenges, and how I push back, depends on the nature of the project. If it’s a public-facing, storytelling project, usually as part of a marketing campaign, then the question is simply: “Is this something novel to the audience?“ Part of the role of a futurist - as I operate anyway - is to tell novel stories and the existence of something as an idea doesn’t mean it isn’t new to the wider audience.

But the argument is even stronger if I’m working on a strategic project with a client. Then the question is: “Would acting on this piece of foresight give you a material advantage?“ This rapidly separates discussion from action.

I don’t see there being any more clarity about the future any time soon. Quite apart from the issues outlined above, many of the rules, the guide rails on which society runs, have been broken or bent in the recent past. This makes predicting the political environment even more challenging and drives us to explore ever broader ranges of possibility.

And while that makes the macro environment somewhat worrying, it doesn’t diminish the fun and the curiosity of exploring the future.

*20+ years ago, friends genuinely used to take the piss out of my Handspring Treo when they all had dinky little flip phones, and ask “Why do you want a computer in your pocket?”