Futurist couldn’t predict our inability to plan for the future
This week, we’ve been exploring the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, we spoke about what might happen with futurist Amy Webb, the CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group.
She predicted, among other things, that we would give up more personal data around our health and location. Then on the show in 2021, she said more definitively that privacy was dead.
This week, Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Webb again. They discussed the current state of digital privacy, the lessons not learned from the pandemic and, as Webb sees it, the victory of politics over planning.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Amy Webb: Privacy is still very much 6 feet underground and very, very dead. I think the key difference is it’s something we’re not talking about as much anymore. Over the past five years, in part, because of the emergence of COVID and the quick changeover we had to make to use digital tools to continue to stay connected, some basic knowledge around privacy sort of went by the wayside. And our content, our images, our voices, are continually now being scraped and repurposed. Some of that is our personal data, as reported, you know, on this show. Others, some of it’s, like, deepfakes and cloned voices that are now pretty commonplace.
Stephanie Hughes: So what does that mean? I mean, maybe we had a funeral for privacy, but if we did, it was quiet. So what does it mean that we’ve said goodbye to it?
Webb: Look, on a sort of day-to-day level, I don’t think most people sense that their lives have changed all that much. But if you think about applying for mortgages, if you think about insurance, if you think about other aspects of your life or your personal data, play some role in decisions that get made, that has changed, and for some people, that has had some significant consequences. We have powerful systems for data ingestion, and you as a person alive in 2025, are continually creating and emitting copious amounts of data.
Hughes: Was there anything that you thought would happen over the last five years that did not?
Webb: Like many people over the past five years, I thought that we might have better coordination and planning to help prevent against and manage the next crisis. And it’s incomprehensible to me that politics came before planning. There’s now avian bird flu that’s spreading, and while we’re not seeing a quick and fast leap into humans, it has drastically impacted the cost of eggs. This was preventable, and somehow we didn’t take the lessons learned from COVID and apply them to other areas where disease spreads, and that is a glowing, bright red vulnerability that is addressable, that we can and should be addressing. I’ll also just say I would have thought coming out of COVID that people would have had more confidence, rather than less confidence, in something like a vaccine. And I just returned from Texas, where there’s a giant measles outbreak, and the reason for that is people have stopped vaccinating their kids.
Hughes: Where have we not fully seen the effects of the pandemic, but you think they could ripple up down the road? If that makes sense.
Webb: The first thing to bear in mind is, if you go far enough back in history, there is a sort of cosmic pendulum that swings from one extreme to another. And the difference as time wears on is that the degree to which that pendulum swings is further and further out, which sort of explains how we got to now. Five years ago, we had people extolling the virtues of vaccines, and five years later, there’s a pretty significant movement against them. And that’s continuously been true, that pendulum swing becomes more extreme because we don’t have a plan. If you are in a car trying to get somewhere, you become a little anxious not knowing which streets to turn on and when, and it becomes even more tense and scary if you don’t generally know where you’re going. That’s the situation that we continue to find ourselves in. Nobody has a sense of a plan. And so when there’s a big inflection point or disruption, there’s this sort of chaos that erupts and that will continue to bring some reverberating effects that people aren’t preparing for, like, probably economic changes.
Webb: You know, inasmuch as we may see a new virus, we are very likely to also see breakthroughs. So genetic medicine is here now. There are new treatments that use unconventional methods. So this is like an infusion in a bag versus a bottle of pills that can do things now, like cure hearing loss. Eli Lilly has something brand new that treats a superspecific type of hearing loss that is genetic. But one infusion of that takes a baby who was born with this condition from literally no hearing whatsoever to hearing slightly better than you and me. That is miraculous. But it also fundamentally changes our current approach to genetic screening, to medicine, to a lot of different things, and that’s the future for all of us going forward. Novelty is the new normal, and that presents enormous opportunities, but it is going to come as a feeling of shock. If you don’t have that North Star, a plan, the result is a feeling of great unease, and then in leaders and everyday people, poor decisions tend to follow.
You can read the Future Today Strategy Group’s 2025 tech trends report here.
You can also listen to our conversations with Webb from 2020 and 2021. Hearing them now feels kind of like time traveling to both the past and the future.
When I relistened today, one thing that 2020 Amy Webb said that struck me was “Let’s acknowledge the disruption and accept the fact that the future is going to be now on a path that was different than we previously envisioned.”
2020 Webb says a futurist would lean into the uncertainty of the situation and use it as an opportunity to think differently. I know it’s advice from five years ago, but it still seems relevant today.
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