183: AI 2027 - balancing speed and jazz
Predicting the future is still hard but getting faster
I have been cursed with optimism for as long as I can remember.
There has always been another idea, an alternate take, an unlock lurking just around the corner. This doesn’t always mean success naturally followed, but at least you kept swinging.
What happens when something begins to do the swinging for you?
🚨 If you’re in Minneapolis and St Paul this Friday at 12pm, please consider attending Marketing Next: Thriving in an AI World at the University of St Thomas. I’m moderating a panel with Jessica Stejskal, SVP Marketing at Bridgewater Bank; Heidi Tuneberg, Sr. Director Production and Business Affairs at Best Buy; and Dave Dougherty, Global Product Content Manager at 3M about their real world applications of AI across business research, audience insights, brand strategies, creative ideation and production, and campaign optimization. Lunch is included but you have to register.
AI 2027
Have you read or listened to AI 2027?
It will take you an hour, perhaps a little more, but is very much worth your time. If you’re on a team, you could make it a topic for discussion.
Published earlier this month by the A.I. Futures Project, the piece theorizes—almost month by month, and with compelling realism—what the next four years look like. They detail how they imagine an AI takeoff transpiring. Their prose isn’t hyperbolic. They suggest that by October 2027 we will be at a tipping point for humanity; that an AI system will be sentient enough and misaligned enough.
Now, I’m still cursed.
Kevin Roose, writing in The New York Times, observes,
“One risk of dramatizing your A.I. predictions this way is that if you’re not careful, measured scenarios can veer into apocalyptic fantasies. Another is that, by trying to tell a dramatic story that captures people’s attention, you risk missing more boring outcomes, such as the scenario in which A.I. is generally well behaved and doesn’t cause much trouble for anyone.”
AI 2027 isn’t fact (yet), but it appears far from fiction.
More than anything, I hope reading it inspires you to develop an opinion.
Or as Chris Perry, Chairman, Futures at Weber Shandwick, suggests, “The right move isn’t to stop the clock—it’s to redesign how we work, lead, and build. We need new systems that move fast and protect human value, agency, and creativity. Systems that make us more capable, not less.”
The overarching challenge of AI is speed.
You and I had the luxury of being able to ignore the Internet when it first arrived. Plenty of companies successfully avoided building websites for years after August 6, 1991.
The same goes for social. Years passed before many leaders, managers, and brands got onboard.
But the pace between those two events quickened.
And it’s getting faster. Which is why waiting to engage with AI suggests an ever-widening, and daunting gap. Stories like those told in AI 2027 only add to the challenge.
But what about Jazz?
I first listened to AI 2027, then I read it. The second time through I kept thinking about the arts, and the movie Her which imagines 2025 from the perspective of 2013. The authors of the 2027 scenario come from a world of coding and computers. Those are their lenses on the world.
What if, as it gains more training data, improves its reasoning capabilities, and solves evermore complex issues, this AI falls in love with music, or poetry, or abstract expressionism? Does the scenario have to be so coding-centric?
That might be up to all of us.
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And for a final perspective, here’s Scott Alexander, the author and psychiatrist who helped the AI 2027 team edit and evolve their writing, with his take on the project.