What if the future isn’t something we head toward, but something we awaken to?

On holiday in Switzerland last week, I  marveled at the serenity of the environment, the gentle lapping of the waters of Lake Leman as we glided towards Montreux and picked up the seductive strains of a saxophone at the Jazz Festival there. I felt a sense of oneness with Nature – more than I can remember feeling when I actually lived in that region for almost a decade. Being back among the vineyards and trailing across mountains on the Panoramic Express to Gstaad provoked a feeling of pure joy. Time seemed to stand still. And as I had time to reflect, I did just that.

We tend to think of time as a straight line but it’s more like a spiral. Past, present, and future coexist, constantly influencing one another. What if we could collapse that distance by tuning into the future we want, and letting it inform our actions today? Not in the sense of prediction, but through participation. Not in a spirit of nostalgia, but through conscious creation.

By going quiet and using the power of our imagination, we remember who we are and what we came here to achieve. If we start by believing that we are pixels in the Divine self-portrait, meaning and purpose will flood into our lives. I admit that I'm getting lyrical here and that Switzerland possibly hypnotized me by its sheer beauty. Nonetheless, I wholeheartedly indulged in it, I let my imagination run wild and returned home revitalized and full of hope for the future of humanity.

'Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Albert Einstein

"When you go quiet—it just dawns on you." - Edgar Cayce

 Going quiet is a challenge in our fast-paced world. We are constantly reminded that major change is coming – fast! – and may outpace our ability to keep up.

While we are being fragmented, frazzled and frightened, something very serious is going on around us that demands our attention. That is the exponential nature of the increase in technological development.

In their intriguing book: ‘Race against the Machines.’ Erik Arnoldson and Andy McAfee report on computer scientist, Martin Grotschel’s, analysis of the speed with which a standard optimization problem could be solved by computers over the period 1988-2003. Grotschel documented a 43-millionfold improvement, which he broke down into two factors: faster processors and better algorithms, embedded in software. Grotschel observed: ‘Processor speeds improved by a factor of 1000, but these gains were dwarfed by the algorithms, which got 43,000 times better over the same period.’

This observation is also supported by Moore’s Law, an observation on exponential improvement, made back in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co- founder of microprocessor maker, Intel.

Ray Kurzweil, an innovator and futurist, also reinforces this observation. He writes: ‘Exponential increases initially look like standard linear ones, but they’re not.’

In his thought-provoking book, entitled: ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum, observes that the historical reduction in the average life span of a corporation listed at the S&P 500 has dropped from around 60 to approximately 18 years. He further observes a shift in the time it takes new entrants to dominate markets and hit significant revenue milestones, for instance Facebook took six years to reach revenues of one billion dollars a year and Google just five years.

By comparison, Forbes magazine quotes reliable industry sources* indicating that it took Dell nine years to reach one billion dollars in revenue. Apple took eight and for E-Bay it was seven…

Professor Schwab concludes that: ‘There is no doubt that emerging technologies, almost always powered and enabled by digital capabilities, are increasing the speed and scale of change for businesses.’ 

And clearly, the development of technology is outpacing human response. We are simply not keeping up.

Despite the potential for AI to outpace, outsmart and boot us out of the world of work, we have no choice but to collaborate with it in the development of the newly digitized world.

Thankfully, we still have traction that can propel us into the future with our humanity intact. We possess unique qualities and talents - such as curiosity, creativity and empathy, which represent an advantage that AI will probably never possess at a level to challenge our uniqueness.

However, that will only be the case so long as we do not relinquish these due to our inattention and a lack of awareness. Clearly, it does not bode well for us if we are not taking appropriate action to create a human-centric future.

Our best hope may be to envision a future that would serve humanity well and reverse engineer it rather than staring down a black hole. We still have the edge but only if we choose to use it.

It’s not a question of whether AI can become more human. It’s whether we can remember what it means to be truly human.

To shape the future, we must stay alert in the present. Because machines aren’t waiting. And neither is time.

We taught the machines to learn. Now we must ramp up our own learning, using our imagination and the power of creation.

In a world speeding up, stillness is strategy. And if my trip to Switzerland taught me anything, it’s this: clarity lives in quiet places. And that’s where our best future begins.