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I hear more people talking openly now about a “cold war” with Chinese Communist Party leadership.  God forbid we get into a “hot” war!  It would be a mistake to think about fighting this cold war the same way the West defeated the USSR. Both regimes deeply believe in Communism, but there are three significant differences between the Soviets then and the CPP now:

One. The Soviets had no ethnic center.  They fostered communism to all kinds of people groups, across the globe, to build a political empire.  By contrast, the CPP is strongly Chinese.  They consciously create almost-enslaving economic ties with many countries (see their Belt & Road initiative) but have little interest in building up leadership or political centers which they perceive as non-Chinese. 

Two. The Western nations had very little economic exchange with the USSR.  Westerners did not invest in Soviet businesses, and the USSR exported almost nothing to the West.  The US government loaned them money to buy US grain in multiple years.  The CPP leverages economics heavily as a strategic weapon.  They learned from the failures of the USSR and adopted economic strategies that supported the fantastic recovery of Germany after WW1 under the Nazis (e.g., fiat money, state control of key businesses, propaganda). The global manufacturing picture and supply chains were completely transformed by China’s ability to become a low-cost manufacturing center within a few years of joining the WTO.  The West has benefitted from cheap goods.  Remember Thomas Sowell’s pithy insight about economics:  There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Note that both the Soviet and CPP leadership have been willing to sacrifice economically when it served state interests.

Three. There were relatively few Soviet citizens in Western universities and cities.  The Soviets had limited ways to influence academia, news media, sports, and entertainment.  The CCP learned from this and openly fund academic programs, aggressively work in media circles, and leverage all kinds of market pressure on professional sports and entertainment.  They’ve cultivated influence in the attitude-shaping institutions.

The wisdom of generals failing because “they fight the last war” applies.

(I am compelled to remind you that I have multiple Chinese friends, in China and elsewhere in the world.  I have no animus against individuals.  My observations are about the political leadership.  Remember that in geopolitics nations are never friends, it’s only a question of aligned interests. I would rejoice to see a billion people in China with deep liberties and economically thriving.)

Sharing a personal observation, suspecting you might resonate with this…

I’m most likely to be unproductive and waste precious time when I sit down to “work” but don’t have a specific plan for the work I need to do. 

This situation invariably prompts to do things like defragment my hard drive (again), sort through old emails, check the latest on LinkedIn, and rewatch a fun movie clip I’ve seen a dozen times before.

Develop a plan for your working time.  Know what needs to be delivered, done, created, edited, reviewed, and imagined.  Decide what needs to be done next. Don’t miss the opportunity to make progress on the important-not-urgent projects. Assign working times accordingly. 

The key is to make these decisions early, so I have a plan and a schedule.  It’s a mistake to think “I’ll decide at 1:30pm what I work on next” because it’s a low-energy part of my day.

Discipline yourself to do what you planned to do, when you planned to do it.

This is my best antidote to wasting time.

Yes, interruptions happen and priorities can shift.  Adjustments need to be made.  Sometimes I’ll fail to do what I planned to do.  This is life.  But this approach means I am still largely productive and effective over days/weeks/months despite the flux of the real world.

Here are questions I’ve asked people in the past few months which tend to make them uncomfortable:

“So what?”

“Do you ever change your mind when presented with new information?”  (My friend Mike asks a nice variation on this: “Tell me about the last time you changed your mind about something important.”)

“How do you define ‘white’ and ‘black’ in a multinational company?  What if I decide today to identify as a black woman?”

“Will this matter to you in 3 or 30 years?”

“If it doesn’t matter how much money the government prints, why bother to collect taxes?”

“When was the last time screaming at someone persuaded them to love you more?”

“Are the forces that drove cycles of ice ages and glacial retreats still at work today?”

“Why do stories about sea level rise in Boston never mention sea level falls in Oslo?”  (The North American land mass is sinking; there are other areas in the world where the earth is uplifting.)

“What is the difference between loving humanity and loving unlovely individuals?”

“What are you willing to sacrifice in this situation? Your pride, perhaps?”

“Where the line between community safety (or integrity) and individual liberty?”

“What are we shocked at behaviors which are endemic in human history?”

“Why not make the minimum wage one million dollars per year?”

“Does this situation deserve unrestrained fear?”

“What would be risk-free in a universe where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is true?”

“I’m intrigued with the idea of insisting leadership teams be representative and inclusive. Would that extend to a balance of liberals and conservatives, say, in college faculty?  Whites and Asians in the NBA?”

“Do you care who gets the credit for this good thing?”

“What questions are we now not allowed to ask, and why not?”

I ask these questions not to be snarky or clever, but with a genuine intent of exploring ideas.  The point of questions like these is to challenge overly simplistic assumptions.  Questions are useful to sustain conversation.

Notice in many of these questions I’m hoping to help people explore a limiting principle. How do you know when you’ve gone too far?  Where do you draw a line, and why?   People with agency – the ability to make decisions – need intelligent and wise frameworks to decide on limiting principles.  The Ten Commandments, for example, are a set of limiting principles. 

Suppose you went to a doctor for stomach pains and he listened to your description impatiently for 12 seconds before eagerly writing you an eyeglass prescription.  Would you automatically buy new glasses?  

Suppose a vendor calls you, describes a product you can’t imagine fits your business, and recommends you adopt it. “It’s the latest innovation, everyone is trying it!” Would it make sense to proceed? 

Leaders must beware solutions looking for problems. 

The primary danger to avoid is falling in love with a solution to problems you don’t have.  Serial solution-lovers lurch from solution to solution without the hard work of defining their true problems and then searching for (or inventing) matching solutions.   

Perhaps you don’t have a problem matching that solution now, but you will in the future.  In that situation leadership wisdom is needed to know what to adopt and what.  Maybe it’s worth a proof-of-concept or pilot test with manageable risks.  You can learn even from “failures” if the test is well-designed.  It’s like that successful solutions evolve with new features, so delaying a short time might give you a better opportunity to evaluate it.  Consider your competition in the market; you might need to be experimenting sooner just to avoid being left behind.  Again, it comes down to wise choices in allocating your attention and resources.  

Leaders should also be conscious that “solutions” might spark ideas about how you could improve a process, or a new line of business.  They can be a source of creativity, even if you don’t adopt this exact solution.  It’s useful to keep your antennae tuned to new ideas, but ensure the antennae is also wired to your critical analysis engine and Captain Skeptical hat.   

Summing up: 

• Keep your antennae up for new ideas and “solutions” people offer you. 
• Beware solutions looking for a problem you don’t have. 
• Consciously test and evaluate solutions if they might have future value. 

I am more concerned about the dangers of eroding values and principles in our culture than I am inequality, pandemics, and climate change.

Provocation for leaders thinking about strategies to improve the culture of their congregation, community, nation, and business: What if our strategy is to focus on the fruit of the Spirit? (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – see Galatians 5:22-23)

Years of studying systems has demonstrated that you get what you optimize for, so choose your optimization angle wisely. Businesses which are optimized exclusively for near-term profit will always struggle with human issues and long-term sustainability. An organization optimized to increase size (or budget) will inevitably become an ineffective bureaucracy. An organism hyper-optimized for a specific ecological niche is likely to go extinct when the world changes. A man or woman who optimizes for sensual pleasures will end in a sorry state of regret.

Select what you optimize for carefully, for the long game.

“We won’t offend anyone.” That was the sign outside the religious studies building near the campus of Indiana University. I walked by that sign going to and from the lab where I finished my post-doctoral work (1990-1993).

When I saw that sign, I would think, “I’m offended that you won’t stand for something as good or evil.” No one should aim for a deathbed claim of “I never offended anyone.” Our mom used to tell my sister and me, “If Jesus didn’t make everyone happy, you’re not going to, either.”

Mature people hold these truths in constructive tension:

1. Being perpetually offended is not a fruit of the Spirit.
2. Never giving offense means you are unprincipled.

As we grow in maturity let us press hard to know what we stand for (and are willing to suffer for because we have a conviction of its truth), and where we are flexible. This is living in truth and grace.

Distinguish ideas and behaviors from relationship interactions. It is right and proper to be offended by demonstrably bad ideas and behaviors which do not support human flourishing or are clearly not in step with the wisdom from God. Learn to choose not to be offended by rude and crude interactions with other people.

The way to defeat the ‘cancel’ culture and media-accelerated ‘perpetual outrage’ is to use the power of forgiveness coupled with a willingness to be teachable. Choose to be a learner rather than be offended. We can collectively move forward through the abundant foolishness in the world.

It’s all A and no I.    All intelligence requires agency.  None of the machines we’ve built have agency in themselves.  Yet these are very useful tools, just as woodworking, machine tools, hydraulics, and electric motors greatly extend what our physical bodies can accomplish. 

What we term “AI” can be grouped into algorithms and machine learning.

Algorithms are created by individuals who have agency.  “IF this then that,” and “do this next” programming.  The intelligence is in the individual, who can reasonably explain the why and the how of the algorithm.  Millions of us receive customized email messages from Amazon which recommend products based on our previous searches.  These are created by algorithms and software written by intelligent individuals.  Glenn Brooke gets recommendations on an odd collection of old books, new business books, backpacking gear, laundry soap, and dog poop bags.  

Machine learning is a relatively new kind of tool.  Intelligent people create a training data set and a decision model to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so.  During the training phase there is a feedback loop so that over time the model gets better at making predictions.  There are some similarities to the way we think neurons in our brain work, but machine learning make progress in a different way than human thinking (which is partly why it’s a valuable tool).  A machine learning system cannot explain how it arrives at a prediction, but the predictions are useful.

There are many different applications for machine learning.  Most are quite specific to a business or research process.  Famous examples are the machine learning models that play Go and Chess better than any human or earlier software program.  Alpha-Go, for example, was trained by giving the model tens of thousands of games of Go, then played against itself.  Alpha-Go plays quite differently than any human Go master.  Alpha-Go can’t play backgammon or checkers or Monopoly — but the underlying machine learning technology could be pointed to new training data sets to create a world-class players in those games.  Another powerful example of machine learning is DeepMind’s system to predict 350,000 protein structures – a real leap forward for medical treatments.

The ability to make better predictions or decisions from messy, complex data is a powerful asset.  The key thing to recognize about machine learning is that no one can really explain in detail how the prediction was made, and the machine learning tool is not self-aware of why it has been optimized a certain way.  Intelligence is still required to decide what to do with the prediction that machine learning made.  

There is no universal “AI.”  Algorithms and machine learning models are exquisitely built to accomplish tailored tasks.  You can combine many of them into systems which appear to act intelligently, but all the intelligence is in the creators.  The idea that a new intelligence will spontaneously develop when we connect a sufficiently large amount of computational power is simply false. Intelligence requires inference and leaps of connections which are impossible in today’s 0 and 1 binary coding systems. Everything that “appears” intelligent is a function of human designs. Scientists and philosophers have at best working definitions of alive, intelligence, and consciousness which are far short of being able to engineer these things.

Remember: We shape our tools, and our tools shape us.  He who shapes the vocabulary shapes understanding.

“Things are going downhill.”

“We need to stop this before it gets worse.”

“Back in my day we never had this mess.”

Embedded in these statements is an implicit “things used to be better.”  Sometimes that is true.  Yet there remains the pervasive idea that things are worse now and we need to “return to” something. 

Challenge question: “When were things great for everyone? At what point in history was 99% of the human race experiencing a life free of struggles and corruption and failing?”

When in history were these things — globally, for all peoples — not an issue?

• Lack of accountability
• Partisan news  
• Lying politicians and corrupt rulers
• Ungrateful youth
• Nepotism and favoritism surpassing competence
• Elders resistant to progress
• Racism, sexism, classism
• Elites believing they have the right ideas
• People believing wild rumors and rejecting facts
• Censorship and suppression of information
• Failures of masculinity and femininity
• Unfair employer practices
• Distrust in institutions
• Wealth spent foolishly

We have made enormous progress, and there is still progress needed.   People have experienced “Camelot” moments in time but they didn’t last and certainly didn’t include many people.   Heaven is in the future, not the past.  

Watch out for this: Many manipulators and unscrupulous leaders desiring power will constantly refer you back to some time “before X was lost.” The scrape the wounds rather than heal them because they know open wounds ooze energy and passion. They don’t want to solve the issue, just make promises in a way that pulls you into their orbit and fuels their desires. This is at the root of many mob behaviors.

What can I do to positively influence the next 10 generations?  What is in my 300 year plan?  My legacy is most likely through developing people and creating through communication rather than inventing something.

Therefore, I begin by clarifying the characteristics of the people, and then asking what I can do to foster those characteristics.  Wise people have observed that history is biography.  So, too, is the future.

Given the scenarios of the next 300 years, what are the people characteristics we should encourage, foster, and reinforce?  In no particular order, maybe some overlap and redundancy:

• Strong sense of identity
• Pragmatic problem-solvers
• Change-shapers
• Rule themselves before they rule others
• Know, fear, honor, and worship the Lord
• Attentive to the Holy Spirit / Muse
• Lifelong learners, creators, lovers
• Optimistic and realistic
• Not easily fooled or tempted to evil
• Clear understanding of their gifting and calling
• Easily pleased and difficult to satisfy
• Generous hearts
• Understand the truth of “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”
• Abiding sense of personal and collective responsibility
• Ability to learn from history and biographies
• Skilled communicators and persuaders.  Excellent listeners. Skilled at coaching, and mentoring.
• Tech-savvy and know how to keep technology in its proper place as a tool
• High level of self-respect
• Able to lead themselves before they lead others
• Teachable, and able to teach
• Seek forgiveness, and willing to forgive others
• Good citizens, participating in civic and political spheres
• Know the Bible.  Prayerful and worshipful.  Strong intercessors.
• Effective parents and grandparents
• Good neighbors
• Hospitable
• Courageous
• Mentally and physically tough
• Active, not passive, but knowing that genuine rest has ROI.
• Live fearlessly out of their calling.  Not victims.
• Use money well
• Crush lies with truth, knowing that the truth is good enough.
• Know peace, what it costs, and willing to fight for it.
• “Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.”
• Entrepreneurial — able to create value from what others see as nothing
• Effective managers in organizations
• Chain-breakers, freedom-lovers, justice-seekers
• Able to laugh at themselves
• Readers
• Thoughtful decision-makers
• Persistent, faithful, persevering
• Full of hope and confidence in God
• Conveyers of joy
• Mindful of evil and the ways of evil
• Dreamers and doers, adapters and overcomers
• Able and willing to stand up to bullies, thugs, and tyrants
• Protectors of the weak and defenders of the defenseless
• Know how to talk to themselves and feed their minds with what’s needed
• Future-focused without severing themselves from the best foundations of the past
• Resilient and antifragile — get stronger with stress

(What have I missed, or surprised you?  Let me know in the comments.)

These characteristics must be taught and modeled, recognized and acquired.  They don’t “just happen.” They are “the better angels of our nature” to borrow a line from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address. 

Every individual in every generation needs to strive for these characteristics.  Indeed, fight for them. They’ll only succeed with the help of parents and family, neighbors, teachers, mentors, pastors, employers, and philosophers – the people who create the space which fosters these characteristics, and specifically teach them. (Government powers always seek to press into this space, but the consequences speak for themselves.)

I heard recently that basketball is the most over-coached and under-taught sport.  In my lifetime I have witnessed a growing passivity to character-building.  We are drawn to the coaching part, and fear the teaching part – or perhaps, we don’t know how to teach for character. So, what can I do to foster and develop people like this, over the next 10 generations?  I don’t expect to be alive on the planet in the year 2321, but I could be influential even then.

What could we anticipate in the next 300 years?

My conviction is that living in the best possible way in a 300 year plan is living the best possible way for a 1 year plan. Why 300 years?  It’s 10 generations.  It’s long enough that the only question holding your attention is “What is the most worthwhile investment of my time, gifts, and energy to benefit humanity?” 

We must first anticipate what could happen in the next 300 years.  It’s an exercise of extrapolating from hard trends evident today, adding in elements which are likely, and stretching your imagination to weave into likely scenarios.  Demographics, geopolitics, technology trends, persistent human strengths & foibles, economics, social structures. Whatever we imagine will surely be incorrect in precise details, but still useful. My book “Bold and Gentle” has guidance for my adult children for the next 50 years of living in this age of exponential technology change.  I made specific predictions about the largest issues that would affect us (including pandemics).

It’s possible that the human species will be gone in 300 years.  I doubt it, despite our astounding capacity for self-sabotage.  A friend recently pointed out to me that humans adapt to change better than any other species – indeed, we change the environment to suit us – and we are the superior long-distance runners in the animal kingdom.  We go the distance. 

The future need not always move in the positive direction.  We don’t know what mathematics was lost when the Islamic caliphates collapsed.  The secrets of Roman self-healing cement were lost for a millennium and still can’t be replicated well; the same is true for the cement used by the Ancient Ones who built the pyramids outside Mexico City.  We have almost nothing of the philosophy and art of the Assyrian empire. The jungles crept back over magnificent cities in Central America and at Ankor Wat.  The 20^th century saw many retreats from knowledge, art, sophistication, and justice. 

Overall, I’m an optimist about the future.  Winston Churchill commented during the worst of the London Blitz that he saw little value in being a pessimist.  I’m long people, and short government. We must temper optimism with realism, especially about the fundamentals of human nature, and the recognition that we overestimate how much can be done in a few years and greatly underestimate how much can be accomplished in hundreds of years.

Ready?  Here we go.

Foundation truths:

• The future can be shaped by people with agency.
• Exponential technology trends — and the changes are accelerating — will utterly transform the capabilities people think as “normal.”
• People will still be people, with similar aspirations we experience today, and every generation must learn anew.
• The future is integrated. All the elements I could possibly tease out and consider separately are still entwined and enveloped by all the other elements.
• “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

Assumptions for this exercise:

• Wars, tyrannical governments, pandemics, and natural disasters will kill many millions over the years but not end the human species.
• We successfully adapt to environmental changes.
• Jesus’ return happens after 300 years from now.

So my thoughts about likely scenarios, in no particular order:

• Global population will level off and begin a slow decline 150-200 years from now.  Effectively every human mind is connected at some level via technology; this is widely perceived as a both a blessing and a curse.
• The human footprint will extend further into the solar system — the moon, asteroid mining, low-earth orbit habitats, and Mars.  We will have as detailed an understanding of the oceans as we do the land today.  Many people will gravitate to these new frontiers. 
• Medical advances will lengthen healthy lifetimes to the point where we grow into a new collective sense of who is “old.”  Breakthrough genomic analysis paved the path to treat the most common chronic diseases of the 20th century — including diabetes and neurological dementia.  We will look back in revulsion and wonderment at circa 2000 medical paradigms for treating cancer.  More will go into shaping health and less to treating late-stage disease.  People will still die.  Even 300 years from now medical care and life-extending options will not be equally available to everyone.
• Exponential technology changes in computing, materials, sensors, energy, and biotechnology will generate more 98/2 distributions than 80/20 distributions. Inequity (unequal outcomes) exists, and is used by some as a driving force for political and social change.  There will be completely new industries and job opportunities by 2050.  And again in 2100. Every generation will be challenged to adapt and find meaning amidst fast changes. 
• There will be an ebb and flow of religious dynamism in tension with areligious world views.  New syncretisms of old religious ideas with neurochemistry and machine learning will arise.
• English as written and spoken today will be an important language but likely not the globally dominant language.  There are good geopolitical reasons to think the United States and China will be strong in 300 years (e.g., natural resources, strategic geographic buffer of oceans and mountains), but other nations and coalitions of nations will be critically important.  India, Vietnam, Korea, Turkey, and Brazil are likely to be important centers of economic and political power. The African continent will be fully developed.  
• Wars will occur.  The weapons will largely be enhanced versions of what exists in the 21^st century, much more AI-driven capability, and some new types of weapons.  Courage, resolve, leadership, deception, and maneuver tactics will be critical elements.
• Personal privacy will continue to be a point of struggle for power, influence, and dominance.  National governments will experiment with different legal approaches.
• The unintended structural threads of the global credit cycles in the 21^st century – we have fewer business cycles and more credit cycles now – shred.  The debt reset will be difficult, with a thousand fathers to blame, and we’ll move past it to something I can’t yet conceive.  This will cement digital currencies as normative.
• There are likely to be at least 2 major reserve currency shifts after digital currencies become the norm, especially in the economic frontiers in the solar system.
• The primary reasons people struggle to achieve their dreams and reach full potential are neither technical nor economic.  Our individual and collective capacity for self-sabotage will remain limiting factors. 
• We are likely to go through two “Renaissance” movements in the next 300 years — recovering old wisdom and applying it in new ways, particularly in art, narrative, and governance.  A significant component will be integrating training in mental fortitude and creative flexibility with historic education topics.
• Many institutions will be broken, re-formed, and renewed.  The breaking points for change will approach as people recognize that the leaders of the institutions care more about protecting the status quo than serving the people the institution was created to help.  Guilds and unions will resurge multiple times as the global labor pool levels and demographic changes ebb and flow.
• Some corporations and associations will become more powerful than most of the national governments.   One continuing paradigm for major institutions is the desire to control the narrative.  The proportion of the human population which desires to tell others what to do does not change.
• We will leverage deeper understanding in neurobiology and psychology to shape “learning how to learn” at every age.  Technological changes move fast enough and typical lives are long enough that we’re motivated to learn new skills to remain employable and successful. There will be ongoing tension between true education and indoctrination. 
• Skilled and wise leadership paired with character and integrity will be much needed, and always at a premium. 

What’s your reaction to this list?  Hit reply and let me know.

I should add another key caveat to this exercise: It’s difficult to make our minds go beyond a linear extrapolation of what we imagine happening soon. My ancestors in 1910 would have scoffed at the idea of GPS navigation or DNA sequencing, or that Woolworth’s stores would be a memory.  My 12-year-old self could not have imagined that Sears and Montgomery Wards would practically disappear with the rise of ubiquitous ecommerce. Paradigm shifts seem obvious in retrospect. Paradigm shifts are difficult to anticipate in an 80/20 world, and practically impossible in a 95/5 world like ours. People will still fundamentally be people in the next 300 years, so it is people that deserve our attention.