THE FUTURE
McKinsey Got the Phone Wrong. You’re Getting AI Wrong.
In the early 1980s, AT&T asked McKinsey to calculate how many mobile phones would exist in the world by the year 2000.
The answer was 900,000. Bulky devices, expensive plans, terrible battery life — the market was limited.
By 1999, 900,000 new mobile subscriptions were being signed. Every three days.
It is probably the most expensive consulting report in history. And it is the same report you are writing right now — about AI, about gene editing, about the science of ageing, and about everything that matters inside your company.
I received that report myself in 2009. When I founded my first company, SciLife Clinic — one of the world's first longevity clinics — the smart people said the market was small. Today, Bezos and Altman are investing billions in exactly the same field.
Your brain was not built for this
As a neuroscientist, I know why we keep making this mistake. The human brain is not built to understand exponential development.
Take thirty ordinary, linear steps. You can picture them: a walk to the car park, roughly thirty metres. Easy.
Now take thirty exponential steps. Each step doubles: one, two, four, eight, sixteen… Stop. Before you read on — where do you think you end up after thirty steps? Guess a number before you continue to read!
At step thirty, you are over one billion metres away. Twenty-six laps around the Earth.
That is the gap between your brain and the technology you are trying to predict.
The machines are already here
Thirteen years ago, IBM's Watson correctly diagnosed lung cancer ninety percent of the time in a clinical study. Human doctors? Fifty percent.
In Japan, a woman lay ill with a rare form of leukaemia that no specialist could crack. Her medical team turned to Watson. The computer read twenty million medical publications in ten minutes and suggested a treatment that actually worked.
That was 2016. We are now ten years and three AI generations further along.
Today, the future of medicine is not being shaped by hospitals. It is being shaped by OpenAI, DeepMind, Altos Labs, Neuralink. Companies that did not exist when I graduated from medical school in 2005 will own the questions of life and death by the time my children graduate.
And that is only the beginning. Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. Mark Zuckerberg has declared the smartphone dead and plans to replace it with augmented reality. Those of us who survived the twentieth century's diseases must now learn to play God — without an instruction manual.
The question you should actually be asking
Anyone who claims to know what 2030 looks like is probably McKinsey in 1980.
What future are you budgeting for right now? How confident are you that your strategy is not 900,000 mobile phones?
Optimism is not naivety. Pessimism is not realism. Failing to account for a billion metres when the technology has already moved that far is lazy thinking dressed up as wisdom.
The question is not whether AI will replace me as a doctor. The question is who leads the change — and whether they lead it with moral conviction or without.
Your brain refuses to grasp the connection between thirty steps and twenty-six laps around the Earth.
It is your job as a leader to help it understand. And as a human being: to make sure it is not only the engineers who decide what we become.
— Mouna