My friend Joanna Bloor pointed out that we are living in the Ambiguity Age. I like that insight because I’m quite comfortable in a world with more unknowns than knowns. There’s much more room to invent, and since I’m planning to Invent the Future, this feels like confirmation that I was born at the right time.
Side note: Imagine if I had been born in an age before written directions—that would have been a disaster!
One of the things I’m most excited about in this Ambiguity Age is the realization that we are forced to ask better questions. Great questions are far more powerful than great answers, just as curiosity offers a better return on investment than knowledge.
I like to say: If knowledge is power, then curiosity is fuel.
I recently attended a Stanford University event with Reid Hoffman on his new book, Superagency. He discusses how AI is bringing us into the Cognitive Industrial Revolution. I generally like this framing because it recognizes the transformative power of humans + machines to change the slope of progress.
Of course, as Amy Webb points out, some of these futures are likely to unlock unexpected consequences, at scale and we are going to accelerate existing biases. There is much to keep an eye on in this conversation.
On the plus side, LLMs are teaching us to ask better questions.
Of course, we tell ourselves we’re developing a fancy new skill called prompt engineering, but what we’re really doing is training ourselves to recognize the importance of not just what we ask, but how we ask it—and how that impacts the results we get. These fast feedback loops help clarify our thinking and elevate communication skills. In an ideal world (though the jury is still out on this one), we should also be developing stronger critical thinking skills—examining LLM outputs with an eye for logical and factual mistakes.
Make no mistake: this process is rewiring our learning paths, and it’s happening quickly. Just as the rise of Google shifted our cognitive load from storing facts to gathering information, AI will push us to shift again—from searching for answers to asking better questions. A world where human potential is differentiated by the quality of our questions rather than our answers, might just be a world with more room for being wrong—and for discovering new paths.
As with any major shift, it’s important to get started. Recognizing our agency, instead of being passive recipients of confirmation bias; we must invest in learning new skills. To do that, we need to approach the future with curiosity and intellectual humility.
Inventing the future has never been more exciting—or more risky. The key, at least for now, is to learn to ask better questions. Start investing here— a very good place to start.
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