Thinking in Decades: In the Exponential Era

The Temporal Metacognition whilst building advanced synthetic intelligence systems

You have heard these famous quotes of history’s geniuses saying something along the lines of, “Don’t think in years, think in decades.” They lived in what was fundamentally linear time. We have passed the inflection point somewhere in December of 2025. Now the effects and benefits of multiplicative compounding have surpassed addition.

So what lens does one have to used to look at the future? As in the past, you have been able to predict the future pretty well because you could add advancements on top of each other and predict quite accurately a timeline of when things are supposed to happen.

The things you thought would last year, that would be a decade in the future are already this year. and I’m sure you’re familiar with how exponentially it goes. If we are truly in it, couldn’t we then say that the things which we think are a hundred years in the future could be in a few years already.

If you were to explain to people that lived in 1980, 40 years ago, that in 40 years there would be these glass rectangles that people spent most of their lives looking at, trillionaires shooting rockets into space almost on a daily basis, almost kids that are millionaires just playing a video game, and so on.

Could I suggest that humanity has always lived in an exponential universe? It is just now that we start seeing the exponential power show itself.

For me, it has forced me to deeply re-evaluate my perspective on how I look into the future and plan for it. When only looking a decade into the future is not enough anymore, you might even need to look at a millennium.

Implications of what this might mean for intelligence as we know it, are that we might not even be able to fathom right now what the world might look in a decade. The speed of change doesn’t seem to be slowing down, rather speeding up. The “intelligence” of AI models does seem to be somewhat plateauing, but from my vantage point, what I see on the horizon seems to be that AGI is just around the corner, and it will unlock even a new multiple, which again would revolutionize things.

So I urge those that do look into the future, to introspect what tomorrow might actually bring.