#scaleblindness — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #scaleblindness, aggregated by home.social.
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“Your brain is built for addition. The future is built on multiplication.” - Futurist Jim Carroll
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Futurist Jim Carroll is writing his end-of-2025 / introduction-to-2026 series, 26 Principles for 2026. You can follow along at 2026.jimcarroll.com. He welcomes your comments.
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When exponential change arrives, it never goes well.
That's because most people fail to understand what it means and don't act, which is a problem. After all, there is a remarkably narrow window between "this will never work" and "how did we miss this?"
We are on Day 16. Earlier in this series (go back to Day 2), we confronted the staggering velocity of change—the doubling of scientific knowledge, the acceleration of technological breakthroughs.
But there is a massive, invisible chasm we have not yet crossed:
It is the gap between intellectually knowing the numbers and viscerally comprehending what they mean for your reality in 36 months. It's called the scale-blindness epidemic, and why your brain cannot comprehend what is coming.
Consider this: you can read the reports on AI growth, computing power, or synthetic biology until your eyes bleed. You can nod your head and agree that things are moving fast.
But deep down, you don't believe it.
Why? Because you are a human being. We are linearly wired creatures living in an exponential world. Our brains evolved to track linear threats—a lion moving across the savannah at a constant speed. We understand “1, 2, 3, 4, 5.” Slow, linear growth.
But it seems we are biologically incapable of intuitively grasping “1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32.” Wildly fast exponential growth.
Because of this evolutionary flaw, the vast majority of leaders suffer from "Scale-Blindness." When we look at an emerging exponential technology, our brains instinctively project its growth linearly. We do a 1-2-3-4-5 - not a 1-2-4-8-16-32. We look at what it can do today—which is usually underwhelming—and assume next year it will be maybe 10% better. And the fact is, it could be 100% better, or 1,000%, or maybe even 10,000%
And because of our blindness, we fail to miss out on the significance of the trend.
Think about it another way - if we see a 10-foot wave coming and prepare accordingly, completely blind to the fact that the exponential function will turn it into a 100-foot tsunami by the time it reaches shore.
That's why principle **#16** in this series isn't about learning more facts; it's about forcing your brain to undergo a sort of exponential shock therapy so you can cure this blindness before it's too late. That's because there is comfort in incremental thinking!
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**#ScaleBlindness** **#Exponential** **#Velocity** **#Disruption** **#Innovation** **#Acceleration** **#Linear**Futurist Jim Carroll believes that most organizations are falling way behind when it comes to the 'acceleration gap.'