Welcome to the future…again. Amidst the season of future-casting, I have been reflecting less on ‘what is happening out there’ and more on the reaction – and on ‘what is happening for us’.
A couple of years ago, I got offered a lift in a self-driving taxi. The fascination amongst the group I was with focused on the car, and how different it was – but I felt more curious about what it could mean for the role of passengers.
The plethora of New Year predictions is filled with tech, geopolitics and macro forces – and often absents much of the human story. Whilst there are undoubtedly fascinating aspects of technical evolution, it seems bizarre to discuss any element of gadget or process engineering without understanding what it means for people. While tech gets faster and more powerful at an exponential rate, we’re at risk of ‘Passengerisation’ – losing agency to AI agents, and scrolling the news cycle in a state of overwhelm. If we fully strap in, with no reflection or conscious consideration, then humanity risks slipping into non-playable characters in a game we have no means of influencing. Passengerisation is unlikely to catch on as a recognisable mega-trend, but it feels like a major 2026 phenomenon hiding in plain sight.
The pace of information increases the risk of our attention being locked into a perpetual cycle with insufficient time to digest, and feeling little empowerment to alter its course. We incrementally become passengers on a driverless bus, so entranced by its super-advanced features that we become distracted from the fact that the destination appears to be a point somewhere over a cliff edge…
The antidote to Passengerisation means tapping into the nascent futures beyond the headlines; exploring the emerging realities people are creating – entrepreneurs, network coordinators, coalition builders, research communities, creative pioneers and impact leaders. These are the places, just out of sight of the official story of what 2026 will bring, where a more human, regenerative world is being created day by day. Not in insulated bubbles, but floating in the same choppy waters as the techtopia, polycrises and geopolitical tectonic shifts.
In my time as a strategist (including a fair amount of future scenario synthesis) I learned that, ultimately, the most important decision we all must (and can) make, is where and how to direct our attention. We may not be able to fully unplug from being passengers, but we can choose to get off the ‘future bus’ from time to time for encounters with people on the outside. In those moments, we can experience possibility, inspiration, and a sense that another world is possible if we collectively decide to step into it. In those moments, whether frequent or rare, we might more easily remember where it is we wanted to go and who we wanted to go with.
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