#16 - How to Believe in the Future

I'm hungover on a plane to Las Vegas for a friend's bachelor party. Typing this out with dinosaur-arms on my work laptop. My battery's at 47% and it likes to die at 20.

Let's keep this brief, shall we?

Despite his quirks, Elon Musk is still one of my greatest role models.

I'll pause here while half of you unsubscribe.

Still with me? Great.

High on the list of things I admire about him is how he makes bold predictions about where technology is headed, and then builds companies based on those beliefs.

He places these bets much earlier than anyone else is willing to, well before these bold predictions become commonplace beliefs. Because of that, he gets a few-years head start on the competition, giving him exclusive access to talent, capital, vendors, and early adopters.

That's been the story with all his companies. There was significant technical uncertainty in all of them:

• Tesla: Could batteries become cost-effective and high-capacity enough to support fully-electric vehicles? Could computer vision and ML-driven control systems get reliable enough to support full self-driving?

• SpaceX: Is it possible to develop fully-reusable rockets that land themselves? Could space exploration become economical and reliable enough to put humans on Mars?

  Neuralink: Could brain-computer interfaces be wired into human brains to treat neurological conditions? Could direct human-AI interactions be facilitate with this technology?

Despite all that uncertainty, he marched forward confidently.

How did he do it? People chalk it up to "unparalleled risk-tolerance", but that's not it. He doesn't waste his time on things he doesn't believe whole-heartedly will work.

And that’s his secret power: Belief. An unshakeable belief in the future. He doesn’t think all these things are possible, he knows they are.

So how can we, like Elon, believe in the future? How do we build the kind of conviction that kicks us out of "I'll wait to see how this develops..." mode and into "I'm going to dedicate the next 10 years to this" mode.

Everyone needs a “Frame-Buster”. Some tactic they can turn to which temporarily breaks their default thought patterns so they can forecast the future objectively.

I'll share with you the frame-buster I’ve developed for myself. It’s particularly helpful when I sit down to write these articles.

My frame-buster is a question that I pose to myself:

"How far back in time would I need to go before I reach a point in history where no one alive could have imagined the moment I am experiencing right now."

Here's the moment I'm experiencing as I write this:

I'm on a plane from Pennsylvania to Las Vegas for a bacherlor party, flying above the clouds like a bird. The journey is going to take no more than 6 hours and cost me less than my most recent dinner date.

I'm using my laptop—a device more powerful than all the computing power used to send humans to the Moon, yet it literally fits on my lap—to write a newsletter that will be instantly accessible to everyone around the globe the moment I hit "publish."

I'm enjoying a snack I purchased by simply hovering my smartphone near the flight attendant's device—after my iPhone scanned my face to verify it's me.

And I'm listening to a 700 MB NotebookLM podcast—that's the equivalent of about 486 floppy disks—which I downloaded wirelessly in just 20 seconds before my flight took off. The podcast features two AIs discussing a complex reinforcement learning paper I uploaded.

When you stop to think about it, it's awe-inspiring how far we've come as a species. We're living in a world that not too long ago would have seemed like pure science fiction.

How far back in time would I need to go before no one alive could have imagined a world where people have supercomputers in their pockets? A world where paper money is almost never used? A world where an average joe can travel from one U.S. coast to the other and back for a weekend? A world where people use wireless earphones to listen to two robots talk to each other?

I don't think very far.

By appreciating how large the gap is between our human origins and our present state, I see that the gap between our present state and the “uncertain” future is actually relatively tiny.

What's the bigger logical leap? That we would go from hunting our food and sleeping in caves to the world as it is today? Or that we would go from the world as it is today to a world that's only slightly more unbelievable: one with AR glasses, robot assistants, and cars without steering wheels?

When I use my "frame buster", I realize that everything we can imagine will come true, along with about a million things we can't imagine.

What's your "frame buster"?

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See you next week — Rayhan

P.S. World Labs is one of the companies I’m keeping an eye on. They just showcased that they can generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo. Check it out!