Bryan Johnson explains why long-term planning fails when it relies on predictions. He uses a robot navigating shifting sand dunes as a metaphor: a fixed map becomes useless, but GPS coordinates and adaptable tools work. The lesson: build flexible systems instead of forecasting a static future.
A couple years ago, I was in the Middle east with a leader of a country. He was telling me about his country's 2030 goals, and I said, how would you even dare take on such a challenge? Because the world's going to change radically in that period of time. And he said, okay, fair, but I have to do something like, how would you think about it? And I said, okay, let's imagine we are playing a game, and there's a robot here in the sand, and we want to get the robot to the most distant sand dune on the horizon. We could take one or two approaches. One is, we could take a topographical map of the sand dunes, and we could load that map into the robot and say, all right, robot, go. So the robot takes off in the sand, and within a few minutes, the robot is stuck in the sand because the sand shifted. The second alternative would be to say, all right, robot, you're going to this sand dune over there. We're not going to give you any map. We're just going to give you the GPS coordinates, but we're going to give you these tools so that you can adapt to when the sand changes. If you were to look at those two, I would be more inclined to build a robot that was adaptable to changing sands than I would be to try to predict the map of the sand.
