Who Killed the Futurist in You?
Somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking big. Not startup-big — civilisation-big. We got so consumed by quarterly targets and sprint cycles that we forgot to look up. We forgot to ask the uncomfortable, sprawling questions that don’t fit neatly into a pitch deck.
So here they are.
Are we underestimating evolution? Can we boost natural evolution to the speed of socio-economic evolution? Do we really care about the next revolution — or just the next release?
Are we capable of changing the world into a better planet to live on? We are. So let me rephrase: do we have the motivation to make the world suck less?
Why are we doing everything in silos, thinking in silos? How can we make everything interconnected? How can we inspire connected thinking? How can we make humanity less ignorant?
Fifty years from now, will an artist like J.M.W. Turner paint something like Rain, Steam and Speed? What will they paint? What will be the steam engine of their generation?
Are we starting enough?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are diagnostic ones. If you cannot remember the last time you thought fifty years ahead — not about your career, but about the species — then something got killed along the way. The futurist in you got buried under pragmatism, societal expectations, and the tyranny of the immediate.
The first step is noticing it is gone.
The Cost of Short-Horizon Thinking
The futurist’s lens is not nostalgia for science fiction. It is a cognitive tool — a way of identifying which present-day choices are load-bearing for the far future. Most strategic errors are not caused by bad tactics. They are caused by optimizing for the wrong time horizon. A company that executes brilliantly against a ten-year window will beat a company that executes brilliantly against a three-year window almost every time, because the longer horizon usually contains the actual discontinuities.
The same applies to fields, industries, and societies. The people who saw the internet coming in 1985 and started building for it were not lucky. They were operating on a longer horizon than everyone else. The futurist’s question — what will the steam engine of their generation be? — is not a thought experiment. It is the most strategically useful question you can ask.
The tragedy is not that we cannot answer it. The tragedy is that most professionals have stopped asking it at all.
2026 Reflection
I wrote this in 2013, frustrated by what felt like a collective retreat from ambitious thinking. Thirteen years later, the diagnosis still holds — and the mechanism that kills the futurist has a clearer name now: optimization pressure.
The infrastructure of modern work is designed around short feedback loops. Quarterly OKRs. Weekly sprints. Daily standups. Monthly recurring revenue. Every layer of the system rewards responsiveness to the immediate and penalizes attention to the distant. The futurist in you doesn’t die in a single dramatic moment. It gets starved out incrementally by a system that never pays for it.
What I did not anticipate in 2013 was that the most significant connected-thinking development of the next decade would be AI — and specifically that large language models would turn out to be a tool for collapsing the silo problem, at least partially. A model trained on the full breadth of human knowledge does not think in disciplines. It finds the overlap between biology and economics, between thermodynamics and org design, between Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed and the architecture of a neural network. The connected thinking I was asking for in 2013 is partially instantiated in the models we are running today.
This matters for infrastructure work in ways that are still being worked out. At Zopdev, the most interesting design problems are not technical — they are horizon problems. How do you build cloud infrastructure that will still be the right abstraction in ten years, when the compute model, the latency expectations, and the agent-to-human ratio in a software team will all look fundamentally different? The futurist question is not decorative. It is the design brief.
The steam engine of the current generation is autonomous systems that operate infrastructure, make decisions, and compound value without continuous human attention. The question worth asking now — the civilisation-scale one — is what that does to the distribution of economic agency. Not in three years. In fifty.
Are we asking it? Mostly, no. We are still arguing about pricing tiers.