What Should Break

WHAT SHOULD BREAK

In 2010, The Economist magazine asked me to partake in an exercise imagining the world in 2036. As they were aware of my reticence concerning forecasters, their intention was to bring a critical “balance” and use me as a counter to the numerous imaginative forecasts, hoping for my usual angry, dismissive, and irascible philippic.

Quite surprised they were when, after a two-hour (slow) walk, I wrote a series of forecasts at one go and sent them the text. They probably thought at first that I was pulling a prank on them, or that someone got the wrong email and was impersonating me. Outlining the reasoning on fragility and asymmetry (concavity to errors), I explained that I would expect the future to be populated with wall-to-wall bookshelves, the device called the telephone, artisans, and such, using the notion that most technologies that are now twenty-five years old should be around in another twenty-five years—once again, most, not all.7 But the fragile should disappear, or be weakened. Now, what is fragile? The large, optimized, overreliant on technology, overreliant on the so-called scientific method instead of age-tested heuristics. Corporations that are large today should be gone, as they have always been weakened by what they think is their strength: size, which is the enemy of corporations as it causes disproportionate fragility to Black Swans. City-states and small corporations are more likely to be around, even thrive. The nation-state, the currency-printing central bank, these things called economics departments, may stay nominally, but they will have their powers severely eroded. In other words, what we saw in the left column of the Triad should be gone—alas to be replaced by other fragile items.