New Beginnings
What's coming in 2025
Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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🎤 Mic Check
There’s no way around it: I’ve been away for a while.
I approach your inbox with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. It feels good to be back.
After something of a hiatus, I want to reignite the New World Same Humans fire. And I thought I’d start with an update on what I’ve been up to, and what’s coming for NWSH next year.
Many of you are longtime readers who’ve been with this newsletter since its origins in the early days of 2020. For others, this is your first instalment. Either way, there’s been a lot going on in the background. And I want to catch everyone up.
I’ll start with a quick tour of what I’ve been doing, and how that’s shaped my current thinking.
Then I’ll get on to what’s ahead for this newsletter. And last, I’ll share news of a coming project that I couldn’t be more excited about.
Let’s get into it.
👋 Where I’m At
There haven’t been too many NWSH instalments this year. On the other hand, I haven’t been doing nothing. So what’s been going on?
The truth is that the writing part of my life has changed a great deal across the last year or so. In ways that are great, and that should make NWSH an even more interesting and useful place for all of us.
I now write a longform essay each month for Global Macro Investor, where I’m head of technology research. GMI is one of the world’s leading independent research services for investment banks, pension funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors.
Via this work, I’ve been allowed an insight into the thinking and priorities of some of the world’s most significant capital allocators. They are waking up to a reality that we’ve long be mindful of: an ongoing technology revolution is eating the old and spitting out the new at a furious rate. Vast changes are afoot, and these people want to understand them.
GMI was founded by Raoul Pal, who is also the co-founder and CEO of financial knowledge and education platform Real Vision. As many of you already know, in late 2023 Raoul and I span out a tech-focused research service, The Exponentialist.
The Exponentialist is aimed at the individual reader. It comes with an investment portfolio to follow, which I’m pleased to say has had a great year.
But we’re here to talk about NWSH. So what does all this mean for us?
The work I’m doing at GMI and The Exponentialist means I’ve travelled even deeper down the tech and futures-themed rabbit holes we’ve long explored here. Now, I want to do more to share the fruits of that with all of you.
Of course, I can’t show everything that I do for paying subscribers. But I can give you a peak behind the curtain at the ideas, frameworks, and analysis I’m developing. Meanwhile, I can also cultivate NWSH as a space for the kinds of more personal reflection that don’t always find a home elsewhere.
So on that front, let’s turn to concrete plans for this place.
💥 NWSH in 2025
The situation: I’m doing the deepest and broadest thinking of my life. I’m writing more than ever. I want to share some of that here.
The challenges: (i) the work I do here needs to provide huge value to you, the reader, (ii) it needs to be compatible with my other time commitments, (iii) it needs to respect my paying subscribers.
The answers I’ve come to:
A weekly postcard from the New World
This is at the heart of the new plan. Every Sunday afternoon you’ll get a brief note from me. A single thought, idea, or reflection, often sparked by a happening that week.
Think of it as a weekly postcard from the world that is coming.
These notes will lean into the concerns that have always been at the heart of this newsletter. What is the nature of the technology revolution unfolding around us? What are its implications: for our economies, our politics, and more? And, most of all, how will we live, how will we be humans, amid all this?
They will be a space for me to share some of the ideas and analytical frameworks I’m developing now.
But I’ll also share more personal reflections. We’re in the early days of a blizzard of machine-generated writing. In fact, I’m coming to believe that we’re in the early days of a phenomenon even more strange: via the AI revolution, we’re seeing the emergence of something akin to a new kind of mind — a new, machinic lifeform.
Amid that, accessing the part of ourselves that is embodied — that knows how it feels to be a human being living through these times — is more important than ever.
As machine-life evolves us, we’ll need to build enclaves for we humans; spaces for free thought and feeling, in which we can share our experience of the the new world taking shape around us. I want this newsletter to be one of those spaces.
And on that note…
Rebooting Community Salons
I’ve always thought of NWSH as a conversation. So there needs to be a way for us all to come together.
A while back I launched monthly Community Salons. The mechanics are simple: I share a post, offer some thoughts of my own, and then conversation kicks off in the comments.
We had some great conversations. And then the hiatus came.
So it’s a simple approach: in 2025, the salons will be back. We are even greater in number now than we were a year ago, when the first salons took place. I can’t wait to hear from all of you.
Occasional Essays
In addition to the weekly postcards and monthly salons, I’ll share occasional longform essays.
Many of these will be excerpts from The Exponentialist archive, and some will be bespoke.
This gives me a chance to share some of the deepest thinking and research I’m doing. There’s no regular schedule here; when a postcard just isn’t enough, I’ll deploy an essay.
🚀 Ready to Launch
That’s the plan. It sets us up for a great year ahead.
There’s no doubt that we’re living through an amazing time. Across the next few years, it will become clear to the mainstream as never before that an exponential technology revolution — and especially the advent of intelligent machines — is the most pressing challenge we face.
In other words, the phenomenon that we’ve long been anatomising here — it’s now becoming the phenomenon for everyone.
I’ll be watching every step of the way. And I can’t wait to start sharing my thinking with all of you again.
Expect the first postcard in your inbox this Sunday.
The only remaining consideration: I’ll soon be sharing news of a couple of big projects that have kept me busy across 2024, and that are now nearing launch.
In fact, I can’t resist giving you a quick glimpse of the first…
🌐 Chief AI Officer
In addition to the research products I write, I still do some hands-on consulting and a lot of speaking.
All anyone wants to talk about right now is AI. And that’s understandable. We’re amid the emergence of the next great computing paradigm. Organisations need to understand what an age of abundant intelligence will mean for them.
Driven by all this, I’ve set my sights on a goal. I want to build the world’s leading independent community for knowledge work professionals who are grappling with the AI revolution. That means leaders in the the C-suite, strategists, HR professionals, marketers, founders and more. Anyone, in short, wrestling with the challenges that this moment poses: what does AI mean for our organisation? How can we put it to work for our own people and processes? How will it change what our customers expect?
This community will be called Chief AI Officer. And it will launch with a series of conversations with senior AI leaders — people at the top of this field, doing battle with just the kinds of questions I outline above.
I have an amazing roster of guests in the bank. And we’ll launch with one that I’m super-proud of: David Rowlands, the Global Chief AI Officer of KPMG.
David is a thoughtful and inspiring leader. KPMG have led the way when it comes to exploring the practical implications of AI for knowledge work. And David has led fascinating experiments on how to leverage AI to improve social mobility — a subject he is passionate about.
So we’ll start with the conversations, and build from there. I can’t wait to tell you more about all this. Watch out for the official launch of Chief AI Officer next week.
🖋️ Signing Off
That’s more than enough from me for now.
Given where we stand as 2024 draws to a close, we’re in for a 2025 that will prove by turns wild, terrifying, and fascinating. Expect more frontier AI models. Humanoid robots are approaching a ChatGPT moment of their own. And then there’s the strange new Musk-Trump alliance; it’s a safe bet that I’ll be writing some postcards about that.
A whole new world is taking shape out there. And we get to witness it firsthand.
As ever, thanks for coming along for this ride. I’ll be back soon,
David.
All very exciting! Thanks!
Thank you, David.
Have missed your wisdom.