Google DeepMind Insider: You wont Survive the AI-First Economy, unless... - Steve Brown

So there's a lot you talk about there, that one second.

We talk about a futurist, and one of the things you've said multiple times is you don't go hide in a room and smoke something and then come out of it.

You're actually using-

[laughs] I wish that was what I had to do, yeah

... specific... [laughs] So much easier.

What does a futurist do? If you're not going out there and just rubbing a crystal ball or at least here in the United States we had that, [coughs] the magic eight ball that you spin around and that thing pops up and says, "It may, may be possible." What is the difference between a futurist and someone who's just pulling it out of their tuchus?

A futurist doesn't make predictions is the first thing.

People think that futurists make predictions.

What a futurist does is look at trends, how those trends play out over time, and then looks at how those trends will collide in the future to make things possible.

So it's about understanding what will be possible in a certain time frame.

It doesn't mean it's gonna happen.

It just means the technology trends are going to the point where this will be possible, the people trends, the business trends, and you're looking at the confluence of those at some point in the future, and you're fundamentally trying to ask and answer two questions: What's the future we want to build, and what is the future we want to avoid? And they're flip sides of the same coin, but they're both important questions to address, of course.

You know, perhaps if we had addressed that when we were thinking more about social media, people thought about the future they wanted to build, "Oh, people will share information and recipes," and, and didn't think so much about the future we want to avoid, um, which is the situation we're in today.

Incredibly.