There is a lot of progress in terms of the process through which cities now decide, for instance, to build a park or not. There are set of techniques that people now use where they try and basically get input from all the people who might be potentially impacted by it. We're trying to do something as a species that we have never done before, both with climate change and other things like artificial intelligence and super intelligence. But because of our intelligence on some level, we believe we'll have a serious problem in 20 years or 50 years or whatever you think it is.
We all face fork-in-the-road moments in our lives. In his 2005 bestseller “Blink,” Next Big Idea Club curator (and this episode’s guest interviewer) Malcolm Gladwell famously argued that snap judgments can be just as effective as meticulous planning. In this lively conversation, author Steven Johnson (“Farsighted”) disagrees, arguing that big, complex decisions require careful thought and scenario-building.