I don’t buy that our imagined AI dystopia is inevitable. ‘The end of civilisation’ and ‘Humans reduced to the entertaining pets of a superintelligence' make for startling headlines. They prey on our fears in this Age of Amplified Fear.
Perhaps the fearmongers assume we will all lie down en masse as tsunamis of anxiety wash over us. But people have a habit of resisting things that threaten their interests. Not always successfully, mind you. Still, we are not simply spectators.
History is a useful teacher. In IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (2020), Jill Lepore tells the story of Simulmatics’s work for the Kennedy campaign in 1960 – an early attempt to use computers not merely to call an election, but to help shape the campaign itself. (Computers had already predicted an election: a UNIVAC predicted Eisenhower’s 1952 landslide on CBS.)
The pioneering Simulmatics Corporation ran its “People Machine” on an IBM 704. Its model was built on 480 voter types and was used to estimate how voters would react to campaign promises. One was a civil rights stance. Simulmatics advised that the approach would gain the Kennedy campaign more votes than it would cost. Kennedy won by a very narrow popular-vote margin. That does not, of course, establish how much the machine mattered.
The outcry of fear and outrage arrived before the evidence of the machine’s effect. Manipulation! Subterfuge! The subversion of democracy by machine! Within a decade the Simulmatics company was bust, and by 1970 it was gone.
Do we feel today that the ‘manipulative powers’ of computers in the 1960s were the beginning of the end? Some of what looked sinister then looks rather like plain common sense today: use computers and a sample population to find out what people think and want, and develop policies that support their preferences.
Listening to voters is not, in itself, a betrayal of democracy. But how their information is gathered, what they are told and whether promises are kept all matter. A model can help a campaign listen. It can also help it manipulate. Used responsibly, I think it can serve democracy rather than undermine it.
The point of this story is not only the questionable and ethical predictive power of the machine, but the reaction to it. Some people took a pessimistic view, and dystopian visions of the future ensued. It’s as if our natures are programmed to fear and be sceptical of change, and to be especially wary of control from strange outside forces.
None of this proves that today’s AI is harmless. The machines are different, and so are their reach and power. But the speed with which we imagine the worst feels familiar.
Simulmatics had a second target audience: the market research arm of Madison Avenue, where behavioural science was being put to commercial use. There was very big money in advertising in the 1960s, and a blockbuster campaign could launch a company into the stratosphere of commercial success or consign a failed product to the dustbin. Getting your predictions right meant big money.
The objection from Madison Avenue was a fair one: predictions of future campaign success were built on past data, and consumers can be very fickle. But that objection was quite profound. How well suited are computers, armed with the best algorithms and the most data, to predicting the future at all?
I’m reminded of the Macintosh. Apple introduced it in January 1984, a couple of years after the IBM PC had arrived in 1981. Its launch was announced in the “1984” Super Bowl commercial, directed by Ridley Scott. Steve understood the intrinsic power of the underdog facing up to Big Blue.
What is really interesting is the offer it made: individuality in a world of conformity. Apple and its agency, Chiat/Day, weren’t simply describing a computer. They were inviting people into a different future.
Data, no matter how current, ain’t everything. You have to imagine something worth wanting.
Predicting the future from the past is something we at UP have tried ourselves, and been humbled by. Back in 2012, we said that the power of search would force every organisation with specialist knowledge to become a publisher. As I recalled in my article on authentic life science brands, we made the daring prediction that life science companies would turn their marketing departments into regular publishers of content about their niche technologies.
Of course, we were utterly wrong about that. Their best experts were too precious to spare, and what companies actually wanted was a content partner who could wrap their heads around the science and make it accessible.
Prediction is hard. Inspiring people is perhaps a more rewarding pursuit. Rather than only trying to predict the future, maybe we should also strive to imagine the future that people really hope for.
Today we leave traces of our preferences all over Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok. Platforms collect them on a scale Madison Avenue could hardly have imagined. We can predict some things remarkably well. But predicting a click is not the same as understanding a person, neither tells us what future they might choose to build.
We’ve become pretty good at monopolising people’s attention. But I wager that we’re rather less good at making it easier for them to imagine, long for and work towards a better future. I wonder whether we will look back at this time and ask why so much ingenuity went into capturing attention, and so much less into using it to help people and the planet.
This idea is from the splendidly imaginative Rob Hopkins, who is leading an important movement to imagine a future that we long for. I see the success of his endeavour as being dependent on the unique power of humans. It’s our responsibility to step outside of echo chambers, doom scrolling and default dystopia. It’s the job of communicators to help scientists, politicians and technologists realise that inspiration is far more powerful than outrage, fear and greed.
I work at the coalface of branding, marketing and digital services – yes, the person everyone predicts will vanish forever, replaced by AI. I’m actually really curious about my own future. So allow me a few observations from the front line.
This year, 2026, has felt like a holding pattern. New versions of Claude and ChatGPT have made companies reconsider what they need people to do. Whether AI explains every cut is another question. What I have seen directly is clients reducing their internal marketing teams – including some of the people who order work from us.
I’ve also seen some remarkable turnarounds. One client handed the production of more than 100 articles to AI, hoping to boost their web presence. None of the articles – I repeat, none – passed muster when reviewed by the client’s own subject-matter experts. The project was abandoned.
At the same time, clients are approaching us with large strategic projects, such as positioning them for a new business sector. These need clarity of positioning and differentiation. And they also need a change in business culture: doing and communicating things in a completely different way from before. This change process depends on human trust and inspiration.
In our brand and cultural work for Jenoptik, that meant listening both inside and outside the company, and helping people understand a new direction. Producing the words was only part of the job.
In 2023, UP Germany created the “Bleib offen” (Stay Open) campaign for Jenoptik. It invited people in Thuringia to see openness, diversity and international exchange as strengths; a better future that people could choose to help build.
And years before that, in 2005, Julian Stubbs wrote a ‘Stockholm – The Capital of Scandinavia’ brand book arguing for a kaxig (Swedish for assertive, even cheeky) tone of voice. Twenty years later, I heard speakers at NLS Days reach for a similarly confident voice and language. I can’t prove the brand book put it there. But I recognise the spirit.
I have no doubt that a human brand strategist aided by AI can be more powerful and more productive than one without. But I can’t see an inexperienced person or team pulling it off with AI alone. Judgement is an essential ingredient. And judgement comes from observing real people in real situations, and knowing what it means. Another essential ingredient is the ability to imagine how human life could become better, and inspiring people to believe in it.
Perhaps our grandchildren will look at today’s AI with the same affectionate disbelief we reserve for an IBM 704 working with a stack of 480 punch cards. I wouldn’t dare to predict that.
What I do know is that producing more words is not the same as giving people something worth believing in. A machine may help us explore an idea, test it and express it. We still have to decide what is worth doing – and take responsibility for it.
That’s the part of the work I’ll keep writing about, now and again, from the coalface: what’s working, what’s mega-flopping and what clients are really telling me about branding, marketing and AI. From someone who is still very much alive and kicking.
A final note: throughout my life, I’ve found again and again that an inspirational idea expressed by a trusted person can ignite the imaginations of everyone around them. That’s what I call a very human superpower.
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