GAZING INTO OUR AI FUTURE WITH MY FINGER IN THE WIND

AI upended everything for me. I used to think I had a reasonable handle on how best to prepare and protect my (then) toddler for her future. I felt relatively at ease with new technology, the pace of change, and my ability to keep up as new developments emerged.

Now it feels like future-gazing is akin to sticking my finger in the wind. Who among us can feel confident about our predictions for the next ten years, let alone for the next twenty? That’d bring us to 2045, the year my daughter turns 30.

Recently, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, claimed that in 10 years, everything will be different, yet our lives will change "like, not at all." Sorry, what? That makes no sense. How can everything about the world we inhabit transform at an unprecedented rate, yet humanity itself stay frozen in time? If everything changes, so will we.

When I picture 20 years in the future celebrating with my daughter as she waves goodbye to her twenties, I imagine a small house party or a long table at a canal-side pub. That vision feels natural because it’s grounded in the familiar. But when it comes to AI, so much is uncharted that imagining the future with any confidence feels nigh on impossible.

I can’t pretend I was ever a great predictor of the future, but I used to feel comfortable that the pace of change was something I could keep up with—a steady jog alongside the world as it moved forward. Now, I’m getting shin splints trying to keep up - the world is no longer the reliable pacesetter it once was.

During my years as the director of the East End Film Festival in London, I used to plan things in five-year cycles. I would structure both the organisation and my personal life around milestones I aimed to reach in one, three, and five years, with a rough sense of where ten years sat. Now, life planning comes in months, not years.

This shift isn’t just about speed, it’s about visibility. Unlike previous technological revolutions, where change felt more tangible - like the clanking cogs of the Industrial Revolution - AI is much harder to conceptualize. Less a thing it's more like an event: patterns, predictions and optimizations embedded in algorithms that operate largely in the dark. Systems and services we use without a second thought. We don’t wake up one day to a visibly different world, but bit by bit, our habits, our interactions, and even our values begin to adjust.

This incremental nature of change makes it easy to underestimate the transformation taking place. It’s like playing whack-a-mole: just when you’ve grasped one shift, another pops up somewhere else. The result is an ongoing – almost daily – recalibration towards, well, towards a relentless, rolling transformation.

So how do we navigate this? For me, it’s about staying open—open to questioning, open to learning, open to shifting perspectives. If the future won’t stand still, then neither should we. But most of all, it’s about holding onto what makes us human: our connections, our creativity, our ability to find meaning in an ever-changing world. AI may rewrite the rules, but the heart of the story is still ours to tell.

So, for now, I’ll loosen my grip on old expectations, embrace the immense potential AI offers, front up its profound uncertainties and put my planning of our 2045 Canal-side Birthday Celebrations to one side. Because so long as we're all together, that's all that matters.