Uncertain? Get Weird.
Picture this: a single information network with global reach that business and government depend on. And in exchange for some of their personal data, users can get answers to any question they want. That sounds like Google, but it’s actually a description of Multivac, the globe-spanning computer in All the Troubles of the World, a sci-fi story by Isaac Asimov published in 1958, four decades before the creation of the consumer internet.
Like a lot of sci-fi writers, Asimov’s stock-in-trade was scenarios spun from the limits of what new tech was making possible. In exploring those worlds, Asimov got a lot wrong (we aren’t flying around in atomic cars — yet!), but he also got a lot right (we are struggling to devise laws that govern the ethical behavior of artificial intelligence.)
Unfortunately for early tech investors, Asimov’s astonishing predictions were relegated to magazines with covers featuring bug-eyed monsters and damsels in distress wearing space suits. But if you’d wanted a truly robust vision of tech’s future in 1958, that was just where you had to look, in addition to the mainstream press.
To get an edge on the future, you had to be willing to get weird. You had to trust in your imagination as much as the commonly held picture of reality.
By getting weird, you can seek out the future early, in your own way.
That’s even more true today than it was in 1958. We live in a faster, more complex world than Asimov. Futurist Ray Kurzweil estimates that progress from 2000–2014 was equal to all the progress achieved in the 20th Century.
It’s getting weirder out there, and harder and harder to keep up. In every industry, the old is going away faster than the new can replace it. That leaves us in what I call the in-between. It’s a profoundly uncertain place to live and do business. It is so uncertain that the US military and economists have created an acronym for it: VUCA, which stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. (I’d add another A, for Anxiety.)
One of the best ways to survive and even thrive in this world is by taking a page from Asimov, and nurturing as many possible future scenarios as you can extrapolate, no matter how crazy some of them may seem. Not all of them will turn out to be right, but when one of them does, you’ll be prepared to scale it up and adapt.
By getting weird, you can seek out the future early, in your own way. You can get ready for change rather than letting it ambush you.
To locate useful sources of weird, I head to the margins of what the media, both electronic and analog, has to offer. I try not to worry about finding something objectively weird. If it seems odd and off the wall to me, then I go ahead and take it as sign it’s got something to teach me. Everybody has their own idea of weird and that’s good.
Whenever I can, I try to pick up a book or watch a documentary about something totally new to me. I dip into social media feeds far afield of my favorites. Science fiction, especially in book form, is still a great source of useful weirdness. And video games are coming into their own, too. I also hit up museums to see how artists are reacting to the world. Art is where what’s new collides with what’s possible. The weirder the better, as far as I’m concerned. Not everything I seek out ends up being worth it, but everything helps me keep up.
And whenever I find myself ready to reject something because it seems too crazy or comes from a source that doesn’t seem credible, I remember the bug-eyed monsters on the cover of those old magazines. To an open mind, they weren’t just figures of fantasy, but heralds of the surprising new places we were all headed for.
What are your sources of weirdness? When you need a fresh perspective, where do you turn?
