Sitting in yesterday on a meeting aimed at establishing a Nordic network for foresight practitioners, I noticed there the same vibe that seems to pertain to the sector more broadly: a strong majority of self-identified futurists are convinced that “AI” is going to winnow the field considerably, but (of course!) all of them think they’re the ones who will survive that bottleneck.

Not only is this a classic example of how myopic this supposedly foresightful field can be—particularly when there’s a funding firehose attached to a particular tech-gimmick-of-the-moment—it also betrays a fundamental and well-founded anxiety regarding the disposability of the service as most commonly provided. More bluntly: if you think that “AI” is going to put futurists out of work, then your idea of what a futurist does is centered on the regurgitation of cliches and truisms… and you’re probably right.

(It was Ted Chiang who first framed “AI” as “McKinsey-as-a-service”.)

Naturally, I too believe that the services I provide are not replaceable by LLMs and the mutant progeny of “big data”… but my services are not in demand at anything like the same level. My own anxieties therefore revolve around finding a way to effectively articulate what it is that I do, how it differs to the work of the “flying cars!!1” people, and why it is of value. This distinction seems obvious to me, but it is clearly not intuitive to potential clients.