“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” –Arthur C. Clarke.
In my line of work, I sit in a lot of meetings. I listen to a lot of conference calls. I attend a lot of conferences. Many of these are thinly disguised sales presentations. Sure, we don’t call them sales presentations. We call them “continuing education” or “maintenance due diligence” or “onsite manager visits.”
You sit through enough of these meetings and you begin to recognize different archetypes.
There’s The Brilliant Introvert.
The Streetwise Deal Guy.
The Mad Scientist Futurist.
That last fellow is most often encountered in group settings. Particularly conferences. I’d venture to say the industry conference is the Mad Scientist Futurist’s natural habitat.
Now, the guy doesn’t necessarily predict the future. He might merely describe a possible future. These days, for example, the future seems to involve a lot of e-sports and e-commerce and machine learning. A few years ago it was drones and 3D printers as far as the eye could see.
The Mad Scientist Futurist spends a lot of time on his description of the future. And it’s not just him up there talking, mind you. He’s got sales collateral. He’s got data and charts and renderings. He does Science!, remember? After about fifty slides of this, it all takes on a certain aura of inevitability.
And then, finally, once he’s painted a sufficiently fantastical image of the future, the Mad Scientist Futurist tells you what the future means.
He tells you what it means for society. He tells you what it means for the economy. He tells you what it means for your portfolio.
The Mad Scientist Futurist is a modern incarnation of the wizard! meme. We seem hardwired to respond to wizards as symbols, both in stories and in life. Merlin is a wizard. Faust is a wizard. Elon Musk and Satoshi Nakamoto are wizards.
We have an innate weakness for wizards and Mad Scientist Futurists precisely because we’re hungry for meaning and Narrative. When we see magic advanced technology in action, our tiny minds can scarcely comprehend the implications. We want someone to walk us through them. We need someone to walk us through them.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But it can be dangerous.
Because memes and archetypes are so powerful, they’re easily weaponized to sell us stuff. The Mad Scientist Futurist is typically deployed to sell what the style box classifies as “growth” investments–expensive tech stocks and venture capital and such.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with owning expensive tech stocks and venture capital and the like. But you should own it because you’ve made a conscious decision about the role it plays in your portfolio–not because a Mad Scientist Futurist cast a Buy! spell on you.