An underestimated but fundamental fact in financial markets is the huge and mostly unmet demand for insurance against sci-fi futures. The spell that kept large scale capital thinking that dramatic innovation would be contained at the level of retail devices and services while preserving basic economic and sociopolitical structures has broken. There's a clear sense that the world will become stranger faster and in less controlled ways than previously expected and, like Treasuries during more traditional episodes of fear, money rushes to the few AI companies claiming to be able to survive in those futures, their would-be ecosystems, and the, always reliable in uncertain times, liminal markets where short-term gambling and finance become harder than usual to tell apart.
The scarcity of sci-fi-safe assets is not a straightforward problem of financial engineering. It reflects a more basic scarcity of plausible futures. Weighted by volume — and, not unrelatedly, by media and institutional attention — most of the world is overinvested in insurance against a very narrow set of imagined futures. Crowding makes this insurance unsustainably expensive but its narrow coverage makes it almost useless.
This isn't a matter of technology, regulation, or market structure. Functionally it's driven by bottlenecks in the global information system. Actors making investment decisions at the global level are essentially a monoculture despite enormous differences in scale and reach: they mostly read the same things, listen to the same people, measure themselves against the same exemplars, so, naturally, tend to imagine the same sets of futures.
To be clear, this doesn't mean they all make the same choices. But the grid on which they plan their decisions, particularly as they relate to the mostly novel and hard to map sci-fi risks, is an almost universally shared construct. It's not fixed — consider the rise of the "agentic" term — but it's highly homogeneous — consider as well the speed with which "agentic" became an universal claim.
In other words, it is the cognitive architecture of market actors and the market as a whole which, however well-adapted it might be to normal dynamics or even reasonably familiar crises, is dealing badly with the vertigo of a future it senses it can no longer picture with any clarity. It's not surprising that it clings desperately to the one picture it's offered, even a narrow, hazy, and ultimately contradictory one).
Cognitive architecture problems are hard to diagnose from the inside but their solution requires more in terms of cultural and institutional change than large amounts of capital. To be able to conceptualize a wider set of potential futures, and therefore to be able to insure against or actively thrive in them, organizations need to expand the radius of information and expertise they leverage and process it through more powerful and flexible strategic frameworks.
Oversimplifying, this cognitive architecture problem is characterized by futures being narrative-based and few. The map of possible futures that is the basis of most strategic investment decisions is less a multidimensional map than a short catalog of stories circulated and amplified by a set of formal and informal actors that mostly feed information off each other.
A first improvement is simply to enlarge this catalog of narratives by incorporating sources outside the standard set of economically and socially dominant actors. Just as epidemiologists were outside the radar of investors looking for deep and sudden disruptions, the under-insured and under-invested threats and opportunities are not unknown unknowns: they are just known by experts markets do not pay attention to. To expand our conceptual map of futures requires going outside the familiar social networks (in both senses of the term) and information sources.
Beyond this expansion of reference narratives for the future there's a more disciplined and productive approach, which is to refactor them into permutable factors that can be used as conceptual building blocks to explore possibilities beyond the hypnotic appeal of a believable story. Essentially, it's to use informal and formal methods, including software-assisted ones, to move from fixed stories to maps — not prophecies but rather mechanisms.
The goal in any case isn't and shouldn't be to predict "the" future. It's rather to understand the field of possibilities. Even on the same map, every combination of expertise sets, intuition, risk appetite, and portfolio complementarities points to a different direction. The advantage of breaking away from a single narrative to, essentially, a machine to generate and explore futures, is that the possible directions to take go from a few to nearly infinite.
There's a much better chance of finding safety or a treasure if you're not stuck in the same road as everybody else.
The flip side of expanding the expertise and information that goes into building an investor's view of the future is that it facilitates and requires expanding where and what they invest on. The attention-weighted supply of expertise, technologies, assets, and projects is no more immune to the over-influence of specific narratives than the demand side. In the informationally endogamous world of business and finance, people build what people want to buy — even if it's not quite what they want to buy it for.
A sci-fi safe portfolio, and even more so one long sci-fi, is by definition insuring against and betting on possibilities that are at best ignored and at worst unthinkable for the market as a whole. To see them earlier than others requires building a more flexible cognitive architecture capable of dealing with a more sophisticated concept of the future. To turn those views into projects and positions requires going off the markets' beaten paths, which is where the unexpected is already being born.
Nobody is immune to failures of imagination. I find it difficult to imagine a short-term change in the cognitive architecture of markets — but I could be wrong. However, the cognitive architecture of small organizations is a different matter. The psychological difficulties are the same, but the institutional inertia is exponentially lower and the returns much larger.
There's an unspoken assumption in narratives of the future that the very largest organizations will be at its forefront. It might well be so — but it's not the only possible scenario. Smaller, hypermotivated organizations taking full advantage of emerging cognitive technologies have, in certain arenas, a natural advantage against larger ones. There are frontiers of possibility they can more easily push forward in their search of both safety and profit in a sci-fi world that does not and will not look like any one sci-fi story.