Why short-term thinking threatens humanity's long-term survival

Executive overview

Humans are biologically wired to prioritise the present — our brains treat our future selves like strangers. This short-termism shapes everything from personal finance to corporate strategy to AI governance, at a moment when the decisions made now will echo for centuries.

Futurist Ari Wallach argues the future is not something that happens to us — it is something we actively create, and most of us are doing it unconsciously.

Wallach's framework, developed through Long Path Labs and his PBS series A Brief History of the Future, asks a single reorienting question: what would a thriving, flourishing human civilisation actually look like — and are our current decisions moving us toward it?

What futurists actually do

• Track mega trends — climate, psychology, technology, geopolitics — that unfold over decades, not quarters
• Build four plausible future scenarios (not best/worst case), then backcast: what must be true for each to materialise?
• Separate signals from noise to identify which future is beginning to emerge
• Ask which of those futures we want — then work backwards from it

Why our brains make long-term thinking hard

• fMRI research shows the brain treats your future self the same way it treats a stranger or celebrity — a different neural region from your current self
• Short-term wiring served survival: it kept hunter-gatherers alive when fleeing predators
• The same negativity bias that protected us now floods culture with dystopian visions of the future
• Simple interventions shift this: looking daily at an aged photo of yourself, or writing a letter to your future self, measurably increases overlap between current and future self-perception
• Greater overlap correlates with better health outcomes, higher retirement savings, and decisions that benefit future generations

The civilisational pivot we're living through

• ~10,000 years ago, settling into agriculture forced humans to plan across seasons — the first large-scale future-thinking
• For the first time in history, decisions made now about AI, bioengineering, and climate will affect the species not just for one lifetime but for two to three centuries
• Most cultural narratives about the future are dystopian — reinforcing the negativity bias rather than expanding what we believe is possible
• The next decade is a battleground of ideas about where humanity wants to go, not just horse-race politics

What this means for business leaders

• Companies that have survived 1,000+ years (predominantly Japanese family firms) are run as if the current CEO is a steward for future occupants of that seat
• Short-term incentives — quarterly earnings, current cash flow — are structural barriers to long-term thinking, making this an ethical and moral challenge, not just a strategic one
• CEOs who retreat from public discourse risk ceding the narrative to groups with narrow, logically inconsistent visions of the future
• The most marginalised stakeholders in any boardroom are future generations — they have no vote and have given no one their proxy
• Small decisions made now — which LLM to use, what data to train on — have compounding long-term effects on the species

AI as an Oppenheimer moment

• Current AI development concentrates enormous power in a small number of individuals and organisations
• If optimised for near-term business interests, AI is a missed civilisational opportunity
• Wallach advocates for a public AI infrastructure — a "Manhattan Project for flourishing futures" — but sees no near-term signs of it
• The level of creative and destructive power now in a handful of hands mirrors what Oppenheimer held with the atomic bomb; we are covering it like a boardroom soap opera

The Future Design model

• In Yahaba, Japan, a professor has participants don ceremonial robes that designate them as citizens of 2060
• Robed participants advocate for future generations' needs; the tenor of policy discussions shifts immediately
• Future generations do not automatically "win" — but they gain a voice in the dialogue
• CEOs can act as temporal incursion agents: people who hold awareness of the long-term trajectory while operating in the present

Three practices for futuring

• Ask the great ancestor question: would you be comfortable if your descendants modelled their lives on how you behaved today?
• Write a letter to your future self: the act of writing — not receiving — changes how you conceive of your role in shaping the future
• Become death aware, not death anxious: accepting your own mortality widens the aperture of your decisions; people who reconcile with impermanence make choices that extend beyond their own lifespan and feel more at ease with where they stand in the world