Humans tend to wait until something really bad has happened before we react and make real changes: Witness nuclear weapons and Covid-19. But now we've learned something: being prepared, developing foresight and thinking exponentially will be essential to our future success (or plight).

The future is now a mindset; not a timeframe – and all leaders and politicians will need to become FUTURE-READY.

“For many, 2020 felt like five years packed into one… Historic pandemic. Historic social movements (Black Lives Matter). Historic stimulus. Historic wildfires and climate disasters. Historic elections. Historic stock market highs. Historic technology breakthroughs (AI, Alphafold / GPT-3 / Quantum Supremacy…)” Via Medium This is how fast the world will change in ten years (Michael D. Simmons)

To be sure, the Covid-19 crisis is a tough challenge for many of us, but it has also brought us a decade’s worth of ‘digital transformation’ in only 9 months, as technology has become essential in helping us to cope with this new reality, and ‘remote everything’ is quickly becoming the new normal.

In many ways you could say technology is like religion or a drug, or both:) In reasonable doses, it is agreeable, tolerable or even positive, but as with drinking and smoking, too much of it will ruin your life. Without new rules, better regulation and new social contracts we may find ourselves in a perpetual state of dependence sooner rather than later.

Extreme corporate capitalism (as practiced in the US and in Brazil, for example) is the root cause underlying many of our largest challenges today, such as inequality and social or racial injustice. Accelerated by the Covid-19 crisis, a realization is emerging: capitalism-as-we-know-it is not fit for solving global warming or for dealing with the threat of artificial-super-intelligence (ASI). We must go BEYOND GDP and beyond the ‘invisible hand'. As Marc Benioff likes to say: “Capitalism as we know it is dead”.

More on“What to Expect for 2021” here.