Outside In | Forget fancy AI predictions. The world must come together to think for ourselves in this coronavirus pandemic
- In such extraordinary circumstances, forecasts and predictions by clever computers or AI-driven algorithms cannot provide specific solutions. These can only come about by putting our smartest thinkers together through multilateral action and global cooperation
Uncertainty over our future is arguably more acute today than at any point in my lifetime. Angst during World War II about the implications of a Hitler victory was undoubtedly acute. So, too, about the implications across Asia of Mao’s victory in China. The nuclear missile crisis at the height of the Cold War without doubt sent shudders across the world.
Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic The End of History and the Last Man, published just 28 years ago, seems today as complacent and naive as it was wrong. It also illustrates our prodigious capacity to mis-predict the future.
I remember the well-respected Far Eastern Economic Review predicting in 1975 that the most prosperous countries in Asia at the end of the century would be the Philippines and Myanmar. Whoops.
And yet the futurology industry and the population of consultants worldwide who are confidently – and profitably – offering to forecast our corporate or economic futures are thriving as never before. Armed with exploding computing power and algorithms driven by artificial intelligence, many bulge with self-assurance and a newly minted sense of infallibility.