The AI Time Machine
Living in the Future
Breakthrough insights come from living in the future and tinkering directly with what's new about it—not by having passing ideas about it from a distant vantage point.
Living in the future is the way you escape the baked-in assumptions of the status quo. It’s how you get directly acquainted with new assumptions that can lead to compelling insights.
When you noticed problems that people are having when they were living in the future, your intuition is far more likely to be right because you're solving a problem in the future that is going to one day be obvious to more people.
These are some excerpts from Mike Maple Jr’s new book Pattern Breakers. Mike is a successful investor with a unique hypothesis. He thinks of the best founders and builders as “time travelers”. They live in the future and gain insights. Then they build the technology to get us to that future. Often they see the potential of an inflection before anyone else. They understand how a new paradigm, like mobile or cloud, will change things.
There are many examples of these types of builders:
- The founders of Airbnb understood how the sharing economy would change the hospitality industry.
- Uber’s founders leveraged smartphones with GPS to disrupt the transportation industry.
- Drew Houston saw the potential of cloud storage when most people were still lugging around (and losing) USB sticks. He used this inflection to build Dropbox.
All these founders were time travelers, they understood tomorrow’s problems. Then they used an inflection to solve those problems. To put it more eloquently we go back to Mike:
Success comes from falling in love with the problem. By deeply understanding and caring about the problem, founders are more likely to build something people desperately want. Some problems deserve your love more than others. The best problems to chase are those that exist in the future. Pattern-breaking ideas are less about conjuring up the next big thing for tomorrow and more about genuinely understanding tomorrow’s problems before others are exposed to them. But what if you’re not fortunate enough to be hanging out in a supercomputer lab or some other time machine at exactly the right moment? What if you don’t yet have an insight that meets your own burning desire to solve your own problem?
You don’t need a time machine to live in the future but it sure makes it easier. Sadly, there aren’t a bunch of time machines lying around. At least they weren’t until AI showed up…
The AI Time Machine
The day has arrived when building a time machine is possible. The good news is that you don’t need to go to your local hardware store and cobble some stuff together. Or find some rare minerals for a flux capacitor. Simulation is all you need. To talk about the relevance of simulation we once again turn to Mike Maples on a recent episode of Masters of Scale:
I’m very intrigued by how powerful simulation could be. Now I’m starting to feel like anything that can be simulated in the digital domain will. And, you know, any problem that could be completely described and contained within a digital description will — playing chess, driving a car, and, and, you know, biology is kind of interesting. Biology is really complex, but if you got to a place where you could simulate cellular behavior or things like it, you could imagine the drug trials that you could run on virtual people, virtual cells and yeah, that doesn’t mean that it’s safe, but like you could save so much time and cost if you could simulate things better, if you could eliminate a lot of bad options and lean into good ones. So I’m really interested in that.
I couldn’t agree with this more. I have been playing with AI to simulate the future for a while. AI is the time machine we need. And the great news is that it already exists in the form of WebSim. It allows anyone to simulate the web for a variety of use cases. The place I have found the most value is simulating the future. Using it to see what technology, products, and AI will look like in the future. With a few well-crafted URLs or prompts you can start living in the future today.
Let’s get a bit more practical. Let’s use WebSim to think about the future of product management. I have found a few interesting applications in this space.
First, is understanding what technologies and products might be popular in the future. Here I have simulated what Hackernews will look like in 2027. There is a lot of focus on AI, neural interfaces, quantum computing, and security. These all feel directionally correct based on where we stand today. What is more interesting is seeing what problems these technologies will solve. Leveraging these insights we can think about how to start solving these problems today.
Next, let’s look at product management jobs in 2027. Like the above examples, lots of the same domains are present. The interesting thing to do here is to dive into the job posting and look through the responsibilities and requirements.You can start to understand the types of skills and knowledge you should be developing today so that you are ready for the future.
One more example, let’s jump over to Product Hunt and see what the future holds. Product managers love productivity tools so we can see what those might look like. Again these may not be the exact products that will exist. But they can help us to see the types of problems that need to be solved in the future. Then we can start to solve those problems now.
These are a few of an infinite number of simulation possibilities for product managers. And stepping out of the realm of product there are even more possibilities. Get out there and explore for yourself. If you need some inspiration or help getting started you can watch a walkthrough of me using WebSim here.