Just One Thing

I wish more people understood that the future of human things is not already determined and just waiting for a wise oracle to reveal it. It is a dynamic system created by the actions of billions of human beings, natural forces, and the world of plants and animals. Nobody from a president to a panhandler can control the future, but they all have a chance to shape it. Anyone who says that a technology or institution is inevitable is selling something, and anyone who thinks that a wise council or sinister cabal control the world is mistaken.

The reason it is hard to predict the weather is not that we lack data or are not smart enough. It is that weather is a chaotic dynamic system, so tiny differences in the state of the world now become big differences in the state a month from now, and just measuring things changes them. More satellites and microchips and more PhDs in meteorology make slightly better predictions, but they cannot make a prediction for the weather a year in the future which is much more precise than a farmer a hundred years ago consulting an almanac computed by government clerks with pencil and paper and pots of strong coffee.

To accept that the future is something we create together is to accept that nobody and no machine can tell you what will happen next. It is to accept that nobody in a distant city and nothing in the encyclopedia is in charge. But it is also to accept that we all have a role in creating the future, even if what we do does not have the effects we expect.

(scheduled 5 August 2026)