According some random definition found on Google, a Black Swan event is: an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.

Classic examples of Black Swan events are inventions or discoveries like computers and the Internet, Steam machines, electricity or fire. Each of these changed the course of history forever, and no one could have ever predicted them.

Black Swan events are a beautiful paradox: you can’t reasonably expect them, but they need to be accounted for if one wants to make precise predictions about the future. You can’t really know what will be the one thing that changes everything, but you’ll be a fool to think that nothing will change everything at some point.

I think this is an interesting thought because Black Swan events are often overlooked by most people. Whenever we try to predict how things will be in the future, people have a tendency to focus in the current state of things and ignore any kind of technological development that could potentially happen in the future. To some people, any kind of tech improvement is a Black Swan event: that’s the reason why people fail to see the innovation in developments like the smartphone (when they came out) or electric vehicles.

It’s really hard to envision a world where everybody drives an electric vehicle if you do so in the current context. There’s no way to charge an electric vehicle nowadays in 5 minutes, just like we do with petrol cars, and we don’t have the necessary infrastructure to feed our whole current vehicle pool only from our current electric grid, let alone energy sources. But it’s foolish to think that this is how we’re supposed to do such a transition.

To envision the future we need to acknowledge how society, habits, and technology are going to reshape in the following years. We’re going to change how we get energy, distribute it and spend it. Energy generation and storage, at the current rate (we don’t even need a Black Swan event here) is going to get progressively cheaper in the following years. Electric vehicles, an obscene luxury only with lots of inconvenients a few years ago, are nowadays already commonly seen in the streets, and are only subjectively more expensive than a combustion model with similar characteristics. This will only get better in the following years.

A Black Swan event, like the potential discovery of a room temperature superconductor material, could accelerate all of it exponentially. If the current studies on superconductor materials are fruitful, we could see a similar or bigger reshape of our reality than the one caused by the Internet or television. We could see electric vehicles that charge almost instantly or electric infrastructure that generates no heat or resistance at all. For now this is just speculation, of course, but we could

Another, more realistic, example of a Black Swan event is the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). They’ve actually been around for a few years already. I had the chance to experiment with the precursor of ChatGPT a few years ago, and now use LLMs everyday for all sorts of daily tasks.

Before, if you wanted to communicate with a computer, first you needed certain knowledge about computer science. You needed to know the extremely specific way of telling the computer what you wanted. Otherwise, you needed someone who could develop an interface that was easier to understand, and then you still needed to learn how to use such an interface.

Now, with Natural Language Processing, you can just tell what you need and expect your computer to just understand it and act accordingly. The ability of not only understanding commands, but also context, is going to (and already is) change dramatically the way we interact with computers during the next decade.

We’re going to witness a race to integrate this technology into all kinds of applications. It really is so good, that any existing application could see potential benefits in implementing it. Even if it means the market gets saturated for some time, as we’re also seeing lately.

It’s for sure an exciting time to be alive. The current context is the prefect breeding ground for all sorts of developments that could reshape our life in the following years.