Think Like A Futurist: Respond, Don’t React

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel
Episode: Think Like A Futurist: Respond, Don’t React
Date: March 16, 2026
Guest: Amy Webb (Futurist, CEO of Future Today Institute)

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Overview

This episode of Hello Monday delves into the ideas of agency, “creative destruction,” and long-term future-thinking with globally renowned futurist Amy Webb. Host Jessi Hempel and senior producer Sarah Storm explore how businesses and individuals can move beyond reactive mindsets, embracing change by intentionally engineering their own future—rather than simply being swept along by it. Amy Webb draws upon economic history, current disruptive trends, and her own pivot in publishing influential trend reports to illustrate practical approaches for navigating the uncertain world ahead.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Creative Destruction and Its Role in Change

• Definition & Origins

  • Amy Webb explains “creative destruction” as borrowed from economist Joseph Schumpeter, describing cycles where old ways, technologies, or business models are fundamentally replaced by new ones due to converging forces.
    • “This process in which the old is sort of by necessity destroyed, not just to make way for the new, but because of these external forces…” — Amy Webb [01:49]
  • Examples: Industrial Revolution, post-WWII era, and the dot-com boom.

• Current Cycle

  • Webb believes that today, we are amidst such a cycle, driven by tech (AI, robotics), geopolitics, and global social shifts.
  • “We're in that cycle now. And it's in part because of all the technologies that are emerging, but it's also because huge geopolitical changes have happened in a relatively short amount of time…” — Amy Webb [04:14]

• Agency versus Fate

  • Webb stresses that individuals and organizations can choose to drive their own creative destruction—reimagining their systems proactively—or risk becoming obsolete.
    • “You can invite creative destruction by looking at what’s happening, recognizing what must change, what’s it time to get rid of, and then invent the new systems…” — Amy Webb [01:49]
    • “If that's true, then that is the definition of agency. It means that with every decision in some way, you are influencing a future that's yet to arrive.” — Amy Webb [05:33]

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2. The Importance of Recognizing and Planning for the Unknown

• Expanding the Planning Lens

  • Webb argues most people focus only on what they can control, ignoring unpredictable variables (“the unknowns”).
    • Example: Organizations making financial projections without accounting for increasingly extreme weather factors.
    • “We've entered a world in which the old models don't predict what's coming. Cause we've got extreme events happening, right.” — Amy Webb [06:47]

• Risk and Deliberate Action

  • The Institute’s decision to sunset its popular tech trend report—its “anchor product”—is held up as an example of deliberate creative destruction, prioritizing new formats better suited to current realities.
    • “We performed our own act of creative destruction by taking the thing that we're sort of most known for and killing it. This is not to say that trends themselves aren't important. They are. But this format doesn't make sense anymore.” — Amy Webb [07:20]

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3. Respond, Don’t React: Adopting a Futurist Mindset

• Emotion vs. Information

  • Webb warns against leading with fear or FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)—a widespread tendency among leaders.
    • “First of all, you have to lead with information, not fear or FOMO. And fear and FOMO right now are the two guiding principles that I'm seeing in most organizations.” — Amy Webb [10:31]

• The Power of Rubrics

  • Development of “rubrics”—pre-set criteria for decision-making in times of calm—helps prevent panic-driven, suboptimal decisions during crises.
    • “A rubric ... is a wise move to have ... in advance of a cataclysmic event.” — Amy Webb [11:43]

• Driving on Ice: The Ultimate Analogy

  • Webb compares navigating rapid change to driving on ice: the instinct is to brake (react), but survival requires calm, intentional response—steering into the skid with your eyes set on the intended path.
    • “You want to react, when really what you want to do is detach and respond... you keep your eye ahead in the distance where you want to go, and then you are steering into the direction that you're sliding.” — Amy Webb [18:54]

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4. Unlimited Labor and the Human Role in Work

• Rise of Non-human Labor
  • Automation and AI are rapidly changing the composition of the workforce. Many “white collar” jobs lost to automation may never return.
    • “What's happening is there's been a lot of headcount reduction in white collar work... these jobs are not gonna come back, I don't think.” — Amy Webb [13:41]
• Structural Lag
  • Societal institutions—benefits, healthcare, education—are not adapting as fast as labor dynamics, risking widening social and economic gaps.
    • “We're hitting into this, like, unlimited labor curve. And this, like, how do we reshape structures so that society still works is moving very, very slowly, if at all.” — Amy Webb [17:13]

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5. Vision for the Future: From Exuberance to Caution

• Loss of Imagining, Not Just Change
  • Both Hempel and Webb lament the current lack of future vision and creative optimism that defined the early Internet era.
    • “We don't have a true vision for an aspirational vision for what the future might be.” — Amy Webb [21:28]
• Social Media’s Role
  • Early networks fostered connection and inspiration; today, their evolution towards ad-driven, depersonalized feeds undermines collective vision.
    • “When you're optimizing for revenue rather than people... things are gonna go badly for most of the people.” — Amy Webb [23:59]

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6. AI, Optimization, and the Value of Efficiency

• Efficiency vs. Purpose

  • Webb critiques the prevailing focus on efficiency—through AI and automation—as a shallow endpoint rather than a means to more meaningful innovation or creativity.
    • “We should not be thinking about AI as an optimization play. That's too narrow of a way to think about it.” — Sarah Storm paraphrasing Amy Webb [25:46]
    • “We just have to make a decision that we want to steer things in a different direction.” — Amy Webb [27:01]

• Caution against Creativity Loss

  • Outsourcing tasks (even emotions) to AI can dull our creative faculties rather than free us.
    • “Your brain changes and the creativity that we hope might be on the other end... we have no evidence that that is is going to happen.” — Amy Webb [26:40]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I don't believe that the future is foretold. I believe ... that the future gets created by the decisions that we make in the present.”
  — Amy Webb [00:00]

• “You can choose the creative destruction path and engineer your own destiny ... or that destruction is going to happen at you and you will have no agency in what comes next.”
  — Amy Webb [04:13]

• “If you are able to [build a rubric], then ... the facts are still gonna stand. And that will help you get to a decision point faster.”
  — Amy Webb [11:50]

• “The instinct ... is to react, and the reaction is, slam my foot on the brakes. The car will stop ... that's not what you do. You have to respond appropriately ... you are being responsive to what's happening while looking at where you're going.”
  — Amy Webb [18:54]

• “We're hitting into this, like, unlimited labor curve ... how do we reshape structures so that society still works is moving very, very slowly, if at all.”
  — Amy Webb [17:13]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Agency and Creating the Future: [00:00] – [05:33]
• Creative Destruction Explained: [01:49] – [05:10]
• Factoring in Unknowns: [05:55] – [07:20]
• Pivot from Trend Reports: [07:20] – [09:40]
• Advice on Making Smart Bets (Rubrics): [10:27] – [12:28]
• Rise of Unlimited Labor & Jobs Impact: [13:12] – [18:07]
• React vs. Respond (Driving on Ice Analogy): [18:07] – [19:59]
• Vision and Imagination in Tech’s Future: [20:01] – [22:47]
• Social Media & Communication Channels: [23:05] – [25:07]
• AI, Optimization, and the Value of Efficiency: [25:43] – [27:01]

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Conclusion

Amy Webb urges listeners to cultivate agency: to spot convergences, embrace creative destruction, plan for uncertainty, and avoid being paralyzed by fear or distracted by efficiency’s siren song. The episode spotlights both the urgency and possibility in shaping a future—personal, professional, and societal—responsive rather than reactive, and calls for a renewal of imagination about what is possible.

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Transcript

[Amy Webb]

I don't believe that the future is foretold. I believe I know that the future gets created by the decisions that we make in the present. And that is the definition of agency. It means that with every decision, you are influencing a future that's yet to arrive.

[Jessi Hempel]

From LinkedIn News, I'm Jessi Hempel and this is hello Monday. Today we're going to talk about the future. Our guest is the futurist Amy Webb. And I met her 15 years ago when I was a tech reporter at Fortune and she advised Time Inc. The company that owned Fortune. Her annual tech trends report has been on my required reading list ever since. She's one of the most trusted voices in business because more often than not, she is right about the trends that she calls at south by Southwest, where she gives a talk every year.

[Sarah Storm]

She is truly a celebrity.

[Jessi Hempel]

Like people line up around the block for her talk. The most recent one was just this past weekend. Here's Amy Webb.

[Sarah Storm]

Let's actually start with your most recent LinkedIn post because I pulled it up on my way to the office today and you're like, it was like two weeks ago, but you are setting the stage for what many people know you for, which is your south by Southwest talk. And you were laying out a theme for 2026. And I think that theme, as I remember it, was creative destruction. It's the kind of thing that makes you shudder. You're like, I don't want that to be the theme for 2020. That does not. That feels a little scary. In laying out this term, you stepped back and you said, look, this has happened before. And I thought it might be helpful for us to begin with your explaining what you mean by creative destruction and where it belongs. In the history of business.

[Amy Webb]

I studied economics and game theory in college and one of the classes that I we read something called Will Capitalism Survive? Riveting sounding text. It was written in the 40s, so it was challenging. And it was written by an Austrian economist named Joseph Schumpeter. In the Post World War II era, there was quite a bit of innovation and economic development. And in the aftermath of horrifically bad things that happened came entirely new things. So new industries, new technologies, you know, highway systems, things like that. This process in which the old is sort of by necessity destroyed, not just to make way for the new, but because of these external forces that are sort of compounding and pushing the old ways of doing things. The old models, the old tech, every everything winds up getting replaced. Now you can recognize what's happening in advance and you can bring that upon yourself. So you can invite creative destruction by looking at what's happening, recognizing what must change, what's it time to get rid of, and then invent the new systems and processes and sort of everything else that would be ripe for that new era that's about to dawn. And there was a whole economic argument behind this.

[Sarah Storm]

And this was the idea from this text written in the forties.

[Amy Webb]

It was written. Actually, I think it was written in the 50s. But yes, it was an old text. Yes. And it dawned on me last year that there are immeasurable forces at play, kind of all happening at the same time, these convergences. And what really got me thinking about this was there have been moments throughout history when convergences between emerging trends and uncertainties and external forces of change sort of smash into each other. And there's not a single convergence that results, but a lot of them. And there have been these sort of convergence cycles throughout history. So Industrial Revolution, obviously that Post World War II era was another one, just as the Internet, commercial Internet was launching into the dot com boom era was another one.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

And we're in that cycle now. And it's in part because of all the technologies that are emerging, but it's also because huge geopolitical changes have happened in a relatively short amount of time and social changes are happening and it's not in one place. It's all around the planet. And it struck me that everybody's kind of missing it. Right. They're kind of fixated on one or like small things, generative AI and agentic AI and it'll be something else AI in a couple of weeks probably. Right. They're missing the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is we are in a moment of destruction. So you can choose the creative destruction path and engineer your own destiny. Whether you're the leader of a company or you're a person trying to figure out what am I doing with my life, or that destruction is going to happen at you and you will have no agency in what comes next.

[Sarah Storm]

I think that if you are a mirror watcher of the news and absorber of current events, you often made to feel like you have no agency.

[Amy Webb]

Yep. So here's the thing. I don't believe in destiny. I don't believe that the future is foretold. I believe that and I whatever. I know that the future gets created by the decisions that we make in the present.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

So if that's true, then that is the definition of agency. It means that with every decision in some way, you are influencing a future that's yet to arrive.

[Sarah Storm]

I think sometimes I see how much can change when we really examine our notions around what is fit fixed around us and what can be flexible that maybe we're not thinking about.

[Amy Webb]

Right. So in my work we have things that we know that you have some control over. And then there is a vast catalog of unknowns. So these are things over which no one entity has total control. What I see, the mistake almost everybody makes is they forget about the unknown so that they like catalog. They focus on the things that they have a lot of control over that may not feel like they. So like a budget. Yeah, you know, we. We had a. We worked with a company once. Their financial forecasts were falling apart. They wanted to know why. And we looked at it. Math was good, spreadsheets were good, smart people. And we said, hey, did you factor in like weather abnormalities? You know what, what data are you using to look at weather? And they were looking at like old models. But we've enter a world in which the old models don't predict what's coming. Cause we've got extreme events happening. Right.

[Sarah Storm]

All the time.

[Amy Webb]

So they had a perfect budget. Assuming that they were in a skiff. Like in a world where there was no other variable outside. And that's just not life. You know, you have to factor in those unknowns.

[Sarah Storm]

And factoring in the unknowns gives us what feels like a lot fewer tools for how to navigate in that present. How do you actually plan for a future in which so much is unknown? And I just want to go back to this idea of creative destruction. When you're in the midst of destruction, you can't see what is about to

[Amy Webb]

be built, except that you can engineer it. The work that we do is extremely research driven. So it's a lot of research and analysis. We are famous for creating one of the first tech trend reports that existed other companies built on top of what we made. It's downloaded a lot every year and we're no longer publishing it. So we performed our own act of creative destruction by taking the thing that we're sort of most known for and killing it. This is not to say that trends themselves aren't important. They are. But this format doesn't make sense anymore. This is an enormous risk. So anybody looking at us would be baffled that we are gonna kill the baby. We're killing the thing that has helped propel us and me. Right, Right. And it's a deliberate act of creative destruction. So rather than waiting for the market to force our hand we are getting rid of that and instead we have come up with something very different. We're still tracking trends, they are still entry points and components for the bigger work that we do, which are scenarios and planning. But instead we have a report on convergences that's coming out in March.

[Sarah Storm]

So it doesn't actually sound like you've killed the meat of the business in any way, which is essentially trying to discern what the future holds in a

[Amy Webb]

world where information is abundant.

[Sarah Storm]

Yes.

[Amy Webb]

And it is harder and harder to remind people what you do and why you do it. You know, we're not like a hundred year old company, we're a 20 year old company.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

Those messaging tools matter a lot.

[Sarah Storm]

A lot.

[Amy Webb]

You know, so having come from publishing, you know, imagine one of the big storied magazines back in the early 2000s killing off a list.

[Sarah Storm]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

Or a feature or you know what, you know, does the, does the magazine go away? No. There's a risk though, that one of the anchors of that business isn't there anymore and then it becomes rudderless or whatever. Whatever it might be.

[Sarah Storm]

Right, right. And of course, the magazines you're talking about, the magazines that I've worked for are mere shadows of what they were.

[Amy Webb]

Sure.

[Sarah Storm]

In 20 years.

[Amy Webb]

Because my point of view, they didn't do what I'm talking about. There was no creative destruction. I mean, that's. The entire industry had such a huge lead time to figure out not just what do we do with the Internet, but now what do we do with AI. And I'm watching publishers make the same mistakes all over again, which is failure to innovate on the business model and potentially get rid of the thing that used to work, but is clearly not going to be working X amount of time into the future. I recognize that's a hard thing for a leader to do, but leaders who do not do that will find that while they are stagnant and slowly calcify, the entire world has passed them by.

[Sarah Storm]

So how do folks make smart bets on the future?

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. So first of all, you have to lead with information, not fear or fomo. And fear and FOMO right now are the two guiding principles that I'm seeing in most organizations.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

So.

[Sarah Storm]

And among most individuals, as we try to. Yeah, sure, sure.

[Amy Webb]

Look, I get it. I'm extremely passionate and you can be extremely passionate, but you also have to be willing to sit with uncertainty and sort of think the unthinkable and be willing to confront challenging questions with information. I just don't see that a lot. I see Especially with leaders. I'm mostly dealing with CEOs and their C suites and boards and.

[Sarah Storm]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

Very few of them are willing to say I don't know what you're talking about or ask questions. So there's a certainty and then there's rash decision making because there's a sense that we're too far behind. So you can slow time down, but you have to be willing to gather information and analyze it and think it through.

[Sarah Storm]

Right. Gather it, analyze it and then at some point act on it. Right. Which is another place I see folks, individuals and companies get stuck.

[Amy Webb]

Here's an easy way to solve that problem.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

A rubric. So a rubric is something you might remember from high school if you had a good teacher.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

Which was basically, here's how I'm grading and here's the points assigned to each thing. Rubric. It is a wise move to have a rubric built in advance of a cataclysmic event happening. Because what that allows you to do is score things based on, in a moment of non crisis, what mattered most to the organization. If you are able to do that, then you don't have to worry about the. You can be as emotional as you want, but the facts are still gonna stand. And that will help you get to a decision point faster. And it will numerically show you that you must take action if a certain threshold is met.

[Sarah Storm]

I love that. I wanna go back to the end of your letter in which you sort of laid out 10 big ideas. We are living through some sort of near term shift in the labor force. We felt it last year. A lot of our members felt it last year very personally when they were laid off and had a lot of trouble navigating their way back into the workforce. And when and as they do, they're very different types of roles. And so I was very interested by your notation that we're gonna see this rise of unlimited labor. Right. And that labor is not gonna be the labor of humans necessarily. How do we think about what this might mean for the humans in the equation?

[Amy Webb]

When there's a perception that the economy isn't strong, which is we have a strong economy in a lot of places around the world, but the perception is that it's either not strong or not as strong as it could be, then everybody looks at the balance sheet and they start eliminating headcount. If an automated system doesn't have to do better than forget the better. Maybe it's like 80%. We're happy with 75. 80%.

[Sarah Storm]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

That's when you see headcount starting to go away. And so that is what's happening right now.

[Sarah Storm]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

What's happening is there's been a lot of headcount reduction in white collar work, people who are doing back office tasks or administrative tasks or coding, all sorts of things like that. And, you know, these tools are not necessarily better. And I think it. I think most organizations are coming around to this idea now, but it is so hard to. It's so challenging to add headcount back once it's eliminated. So I just think what will happen is these jobs are not gonna come back, I don't think.

[Sarah Storm]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

It also would require leaders to admit they'd made mistakes, which they're not gonna do.

[Sarah Storm]

Yep. And look, their businesses are under such pressure for the decisions that they made in the last two years that even if their ego and their intellect were in favor of making these decisions, they wouldn't be able to.

[Amy Webb]

Right. So what's the. How does this net out that overall quality of cognitive work? Cognitive output that ranges from everything from like a call center to customer support to writing things. That's gonna start to decline. And we're not. It is. Right. It's just not as good as it used to be. There's no solve for that. But it also means that there's a pretty big swath of people who are incredibly talented, who should be invited back into the workforce in some way. And the problem is we are moving more quickly toward a world in which there is unlimited labor right now using because of cognitive work. But pretty soon, there's been a lot of advancements now in robotics that we will start to see that changing pretty quickly, too. Unlimited labor feels great, you know. In fact, does it feel great? Well, I think it feels great if you are focused solely on gdp. I don't mean to get, like, super, but like, I think if you're. If you're looking at countries or regions or whatever output, or if you're again, publicly traded company, you can produce the same amount with half the workforce.

[Sarah Storm]

Look, it feels real great when you're looking at your 401k that you've managed to squirrel away. Right. That's where you're seeing it reflected.

[Amy Webb]

So I think. I think on the one hand, there's an argument to be made that unlimited labor, whatever, lifts all boats. But the problem downstream from that is that most modern economies around the world are built on labor. They require humans to do jobs. That is the structure. We've not been in a situation before where it all sort of works out. Well, to have a bunch of people not doing stuff and still have an economy grow for reasons that are obvious, a lot of people want a purpose in life. So just sitting around this universal basic income, everybody will be cool. We'll all go back and learn Renaissance art. That's not gonna happen. But the other issue is structural. So in a lot of places, your insurance is tied to your job, your education to some degree. Like, the parts of being an adult person are very much tied to your employer. And we don't have structures to replace that yet. And things that are at that systems level tend to move more slowly. So we're hitting into this, like, unlimited labor curve. And this, like, how do we reshape structures so that society still works is moving very, very slowly, if at all.

[Sarah Storm]

It's to some degree moving backward. Right. I mean, we're watching safety nets evaporate that, you know, the world I grew up in, in the long ago 80s and 90s took for granted. And employers are the last bastion of a lot of these safety nets. And we're losing our employers. And that will play out. It just will play out. You know, I'm going back to the, like, visual you offered me with your hands. Like, the speed at which the disruption is happening in business and the speed at which gonna put this here, that our sort of our political, cultural, social machine is arranging itself to support the evolution of humans. Those things are not happening in parallel. How do we wrap our mind around the idea of the speed at which the disruption comes at us and how we respond to it?

[Amy Webb]

Respond is the correct word, not react. So I think what happens sometimes, which again, totally natural, you get this, you want to react, when really what you want to do is detach and respond. The best example that I like to give, I grew up in the Midwest. We had a lot of snow and ice. And when I had to learn how to drive, I had to prove that I could drive on ice. So it was part of our driver's test. I don't know what goes on these days and if the kids still have to learn how to do that, but that's what I had to learn. One of the things that. And you grew up in the Northeast?

[Sarah Storm]

I grew up in the Northeast. I also had to learn to drive on ice. And then I didn't really need to do it for a couple of decades. And this winter has really given me a new opportunity to practice.

[Amy Webb]

So let me ask you this question. For those people who may not have ever driven on ice before, you hit an Icy patch. What do you do? Do you slam your foot on the brake, steer into. You steer into the slide. So if you hit an icy patch, the instinctively the feeling that we have is to, like, react, and the reaction is, slam my foot on the brakes. The car will stop, you know, everything will be fine. Yeah, that's not what you do. You have to respond appropriately. And the response, as crazy as this might sound, is whatever direction your car is whipping itself into, you keep your eye ahead in the distance where you want to go, and then you are steering into the direction that you're sliding. And as you're sliding, you take your foot off the gas, but you're kind of just doing this right, and you are being responsive to what's happening while looking at where you're going. And ultimately the car will stop. It is the safe and correct way to proceed. That is a perfect analogy for what everybody should be doing right now.

[Jessi Hempel]

You know, as you say that, it

[Sarah Storm]

makes me think about the fact that it feels like. One thing that feels materially different to me as a chronicler of business and the rise of tech is that in 2005, when I started doing this, everybody had a vision about the future. And they'd lay it out for you. You'd walk in and you'd be, this is what it's going to look like. And one thing that kind of concerns me is that I feel like in some ways, we are letting go of the imaginative principles of the whole thing, that we're not looking up and out and landing a vision.

[Amy Webb]

Yep. You and me both. Yeah. So we should talk that through. A couple reasons why I. First of all, you're absolutely right. In that time period, there was the birth of social media for real. So not just Facebook, but Twitter. And we also had the birth of mobile devices, smartphones, location aware services. E commerce was finally a thing. So, yeah, that the. The core components of the Internet age as it relates to, like, everyday life were both being born and fun. Like, they were really fun at the time. And there was a sort of joyful exuberance of what the future might be. And obviously we've crested that joyful exuberance. We're on the other side of it now, which feels very much like we're in the, you know, just a cesspool of horrible online.

[Sarah Storm]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

And nothing is moving fast. And we don't have a true vision for an aspirational vision for what the future might be. Let me first start by saying that's a normal cycle. It has happened before. We have These cycles of excitement followed. And then usually after the excitement is the fear, and then everybody's upset that nothing is happening the way they thought it might. And what's happened is we've kind of just settled into. In the tech side of things, at least, like the technology that exists. But it's more about pragmatically, what can we build toward.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

And we don't have that right now. And I think partially that's because we've had a whiplash effect in a lot of countries, certainly in the United States, and political leadership going from extreme to extreme, and we don't have cohesion around core tenets of what it means to be a person on the planet right now. And so lost in all of the fray is we still do have the ability to sort of set our sights on the future that we want to build, but somebody has to articulate that, and then we have to get it together to move in that direction.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah. How much of the technology channels, the disruption of the very communication channels that we might use to convey that vision is responsible for, is a cause for our inability to cohere around a shared vision versus a response to it.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. Look, I would say all 100%. I'm sure you were one of the. So I was an original Twitter user. I'm assuming you were, too.

[Sarah Storm]

Oh, 2009, south by Southwest and the

[Amy Webb]

earlier days of those networks, it was a wonderful way to glean from other people what are they thinking, what are they doing? What are they sharing? What are they, you know, what are they reading? 100%. Get that. Somebody out there is gonna listen to this and say, the olds always say, back in our time, you know, things were better. But there's something materially different right now, and that is there's a capitalistic instinct that propelled us to tweak all of these systems to optimize revenue. And when you're optimizing for revenue rather than people. Yeah. Things are gonna go badly for most of the people.

[Sarah Storm]

Right. You're talking about a time when social was rearranged, was arranged around people's relationships with each other. And you didn't need to add context to that, because we had our IRL context. And that IRL context allowed us, afforded us the joy of discovery when we were together online. And we saw a decade ago now, the last of the big social networks just abandon people as the organizing factor around how we got our information and move to more of a broadcast channel.

[Amy Webb]

Yeah. And that's a really interesting point. It is not easy on any of these networks to see the things that you signed up to see. No, the strategic decisions that drove that are now coming for artificial intelligence. So the systems and tools that the vast majority of people have access to, with the addition of ads into these systems, you can expect more of the same, but even more pervasive because so much of you, if you have memory turned on, is now a part of these systems. I mean, we're getting like super. This is gonna be sort of depressing for everybody.

[Sarah Storm]

But let me just follow, because for me it doesn't end on a note of depression. Right. So partly that's driven by capitalism and its desire to optimize at all costs to move us towards a level of efficiency that is no longer good for humans. And we see that and feel that. But I think that it's a relatively short period in history during which we have sort of adopted efficiency as the language for business success. So we're using that language of efficiency now as we move into this next shift, which is AI. And you have written about the fact

[Amy Webb]

that

[Sarah Storm]

we should not be thinking about AI as an optimization play. That's too narrow of a way to think about it. Maybe inherent in this creative destruction is the ultimate destruction of this idea that optimization is the point. Maybe there is something after that that's better for humans.

[Amy Webb]

The problem always comes back to the purse. And for the time being, perhaps for the rest of time, everything comes back to money.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

You know what I mean? And even the optimization piece, if we become habituated to outsourcing so much, whether that is your daily writing or posts or whatever it might be, or even delegating emotions, you know, to. To a system.

[Sarah Storm]

Yeah.

[Amy Webb]

Your brain changes and the creativity that we hope might be on the other end, because now we've got more time and we've optimized the stuff that can be optimized for efficiency. And now what are we left with?

[Sarah Storm]

Time.

[Amy Webb]

Time. Let's solve problems, let's do cool stuff. We have no evidence that that is is going to happen.

[Sarah Storm]

Right.

[Amy Webb]

Instead there's this propulsion towards more efficiency, more productivity, more capital accumulation, which again, it doesn't have to be that way. We just have to make a decision that we want to steer things in a different direction.

[Jessi Hempel]

That was Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group. You can find lots of information about her south by Southwest talks in the show notes and follow her on LinkedIn. I'm Jessi Hempel and this is hello Monday. Thanks for joining me. I'll be right back here next week. Hello Monday. Is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Ava Ahmed Begi, Rachel Karp and Adam Yates.

[Sarah Storm]

Sarah Storm is our senior producer.

[Jessi Hempel]

Sound design and engineering by Asaf Gidron. The show is mixed by Tim Boland. Our theme music was composed just for us by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Mikayla Greer is a friend of the show forever, as is Victoria Taylor.

[Sarah Storm]

Kyle Ranson Walsh is editor at large of Editorial Graphics.

[Jessi Hempel]

Dave Pond is head of production and creative operations. Courtney Koop is head of original programming.

[Sarah Storm]

Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn.

[Jessi Hempel]

I'm Jessi Hempel.

[Sarah Storm]

This is Hello Monday. See you next week.