A Short History of the Very Recent Future
The future is shipping faster than we can process it.
The most surreal part of this moment isn’t the tech - it’s the lag. The lag between what most people think is possible and what is already possible.
I talk to friends across medicine, law, media - thoughtful, accomplished people - who speculate about what AI might do one day.
The only issue is that the 'one day' came and went 2 weeks ago at a demo day. We’re moving at a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pace. And most people haven’t even looked up yet.
This isn’t a rant about hype. It’s about asymmetry.
The tech is accelerating - but awareness isn’t.
Policy isn’t. Public conversation isn’t.
Even imagination is falling behind.
And that’s what makes this moment so destabilizing. There is a growing divide between those building the future and those about to be blindsided by it. We’re already past the part where these tools feel like magic.We won’t get a warning label before reality starts to look like fiction.
The future doesn’t need our permission to arrive. But it does require our attention - or we risk waking up in a world built by and for a small subset of people who were paying attention.
We don’t need to fear the technology. We need to fear the uneven distribution of understanding.
Look, I don’t have a grand solution here. There’s no hotline to call when reality version-updates faster than your mental model. But if you’re not watching this space closely, it’s probably worth asking yourself: who is? And what do they stand to gain from you not noticing?
In the absence of shared understanding, power will pool in strange places. Our job - whether we build, invest, teach, or govern - is to notice sooner. Because you can’t shape what you can’t see.
If you're building this stuff, maybe consider saying the quiet parts out loud - not because you're a hero, but because asymmetric information has a long and glorious tradition of blowing up in everyone’s face.
And if you're not building, just don’t assume you’re safely outside the blast radius. You're probably standing right in it. The only question is whether you’re wearing a helmet or holding a selfie stick.
Anyway, here’s a video I made over the weekend using Google Veo 3.
No actors. No camera. Just a prompt.
(And yes, of course, I signed up for Google Ultra the minute it launched. I contain multitudes.)