Is the Future Already Written?

Time—there are few things as cruel and intriguing as time. Everything goes forward; memories bring us the capability to live moments from the past, dreaming visualizes us into the future, but at the end of the day, we are here and now, in the present.

Humans can Predict the Future

Trying to predict the future is something humanity has tried over the years. Seeing beyond the next step has been an incredible capability that has let us survive, take opportunities, and make history.

We can have an idea of what will happen, and that is an awesome capability in and of itself.

Causality is a reality. If you want to go from A to B, you have to move or be moved from A to B. This makes some predictions easier, others impossible. Every second, every decision, time collapses to a single point, a milestone on which all the future events will be based.

Formulating Predictions

Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong. It’s natural; there are too many factors to take into account. Sometimes we can’t know everything and have to make guesses. For example, I really thought that electric cars would be more widespread than they are today. I overestimated the will of the consumers and governments to buy and provide infrastructure for them, and this time I was wrong.

On the other hand, I’ve made some good predictions, almost all born out of a problem. I gave my students the task of developing a speech-to-speech assistant, and 14 weeks later OpenAI released a teaser with an assistant like the one I was imagining. I struggled with JavaScript drag-and-drop libraries, and one was released a few months later. I saw that background removal models were getting really good, and today almost every side project from tech influencers is a background removal application. I designed a metaverse even before it was named “metaverse,” etc.

Yep, my students were asked to develop something like this in 16 weeks.

The point is that if you have knowledge, you can get an idea of what is going to happen next.

You can’t predict exactly what the market value of a company will be in a year or so, but if you know the company, the competitors, the market, and so on, you can have an idea whether it will grow or shrink. The same goes for products, projects, and almost everything. Since time is a flow of events, a problem will eventually have a solution; an unconverted market will be covered if it is interesting enough.

Is the Future Already Written?

So, is the future already written? To be honest, I think so. I see time as a tree of events already written, and multiple universes collapsing into one of them depending on the path you choose. But let’s leave that crazy idea for another post. For now, let’s stick with the idea that given the here and now, we are able to anticipate the next states due to the causality of the universe.

If you don’t start the journey, you won’t live the journey. If you don’t talk to that person, you probably won’t meet that person. Understanding the future is easy; decisions and actions—or inactivity—move us from one event to another. Because time in its nature always moves forward, you can’t stop it, so why not take action and write it down?

I really want you to live your present thinking about your future. Most of the things you do and experience don’t matter if you look at them on a scale of years or decades, but the accumulation of those things is what defines your story, who you are, and where you are headed. Your time starts now.

---

If you enjoy the content, please don’t hesitate to subscribe and leave a comment! I would love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the topics I cover.