The future is an echo of the past.

March 06, 2025 • 2 minutes to read

“I’m sure people said they love riding their horse.”

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Some years ago--never mind how long precisely-- I was having lunch with my team and the topic of autonomous driving came up. A pair of early-20s designers shared deep skepticism about the appeal of self-driving cars (their age doesn’t matter, it’s just story detail).

Designer A opined, “Yeah, maybe it’ll happen, but I love my car. I want to drive.”

Designer B added, “Yup. I do love driving.”

Me, “I’m sure people said they love riding their horse.”

The look of sheer terror on their faces was priceless. Not terror from the vision of the future, but terror from the confrontation of their self-image. These young designers had thought of themselves as progressive, tech-savvy, modernists who suddenly found themselves on the back half of the diffusion of innovation curve arguing in favor of horse-drawn buggies.

Sometimes the best way to see the future is to study the past. Baseball scouts say that past performance is the best predictor of future performance. That means we need to understand our past performance to plot our trajectory. Relying on the PR hypemachine of modern media distorts our view of what’s probable.

Reading the headlines of our trade publications this month, you might think machine learning and AI can solve every business problem we throw at it. In practice, it’s still a mixed bag of insightful analysis vs plagiarism & hallucinations. Cars did as much damage to cities as they did good for personal mobility and commerce. Independent mobility is good. Parking spaces are bad. It’s always a balance. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Anyroad. I guess my point is, read a history book once in a while instead of industry self-help books. Here's a couple of solid recommendations that I've read:

Worn – A People's History of Clothing
By Sofi Thanhauser

Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari

The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee
by Stewart Lee Allen

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
by Dava Sobel