Inevitable (citation needed)

If you open just about any tech publication or industry newsletter these days, you’ll find headlines like “Anthropic warns that AI could soon escape human control”.

Stated as fact – no evidence needed – track record irrelevant.

Karl Bode calls this ”CEO said a thing” journalism. The format is simple: never challenge the claim, never provide historical context, ghost anyone who might disagree, and never ever go back to check whether it turned out to be true. It exists in a vacuum, elevated to news purely by the speaker's net worth.

So we end up with confident predictions about inevitable futures all over the media, laundered though headlines, and repeated until the thing that hasn’t happened yet feels like the thing that already did.

I’m currently reading Carissa Véliz’s book Prophecy where she argues we mistake predictions for knowledge, when we should read them as power grabs. Roman emperors would ban (or kill) prophets, not because they saw prophecies as nonsense, but because they understood that whoever controls the story also controls what people do next. Make an outcome seem inevitable, and you don’t need to convince anyone. They’ll adapt all by themselves.

We’ve watched this film before: crypto was going to replace banking, the metaverse was going to replace the office,… Each one announced with that same certainty, amplified by the same uncritical coverage, and composted in the archives when it didn’t materialise.

When you see another “inevitable” headline or hear another person tell you some technology will redefine your industry and the only rational move is to get aboard right now, hold on to your FOMO and go back and take a look at the last ten times someone said the same thing. The failure rate will be sobering.

Colin