Riding the waves of history

“It’s hard to predict the future,” I texted my friend last week. We’d been messaging back and forth about AI, sharing links about ChatGPT’s latest image generation capabilities, and debating whether programming as we know it is dead. The conversation had that familiar mix of excitement, dread, and philosophical hot-takes that seems to follow most discussions of artificial intelligence these days.

After sharing some thoughts about how mid-level jobs might be affected, I found myself typing: “We ride on the waves of history”. It wasn’t resignation of the future, but a recognition that some forces are bigger than our ability to control them.

What I’ve been wrestling with for months is this: In a world where technological change is happening at a pace that makes any five-year plans seem like a pile of crap, my instinct is to crave certainty. To look for predictions.

My friend and I had just spent a couple of hours sharing tweets about AI-generated ghibli images and debating whether developers and designers are screwed. We swapped articles with doomsday predictions, then links to optimistic counterpoints, searching for some answer that would make sense of it all.

But what if that’s the wrong approach entirely?

I’ve come to believe that our relationship with uncertainty itself may be the most important skill to develop in this moment of history. Not predictions about AGI timelines or which jobs will be automated or if we’re months away from digital overlords, but rather, how we position ourselves mentally when the only certainty is rapid change.

Learning how to surf instead of building ever-higher damns to protect us from the incoming cunami. How we relate to uncertainty determines everything downstream: what we build, how we invest our time, what skills we develop, and perhaps most importantly, whether we face the future with creative optimism or defensive pessimism.

“Optimists push the world forward,” I wrote to him toward the end of our conversation.

So let’s talk about riding waves instead of being crushed by them. About what it means to live in interesting times when the only certainty is change itself.

Riding the waves

This isn’t about blind optimism, it is about recognizing that adaptability beats prediction every time. The most valuable skill isn’t foreseeing which technologies will dominate, but developing frameworks that lets the world change, without you drowning in it.

Taleb’s “Antifragile” celebrates systems that gain from disorder. Mark’s “In Search of Certainty” exposes our addiction to false certainties, and people who are more than happy to sell them to us. Neither of the books offers a prophecy.

History doesn’t move in straight lines. Neither should our thinking. The surfer doesn’t control the ocean. Ha masters responding to it. Fewer damns and more surfboards. The waves are coming. The only question is whether we’ll learn to ride them.