Why do we keep pretending tech CEOs are any good at predicting the future?
Most of them aren’t built to think five years ahead. Five months is already asking a lot.
Their actual job is much narrower than prophecy: manage markets, feed narratives, soothe investors, chase leverage, and keep the machine convinced tomorrow is worth more than today.
None of these things make them fortune tellers. It stretches credulity that we treat their lame predictions like settled fact.
When they tell you tech jobs are disappearing, or all jobs are disappearing, or software engineers are going extinct, or the economy is about to be fully rewritten by some product they conveniently happen to be selling... we should probably pause for three seconds before freaking out about it on social media.
Because they don’t know.
Belief is not knowledge.
Suspicion is not fact.
Hope is definitely not the kind of thing you can bank on.
A tech CEO might understand their slice of the picture, or whatever's on whatever dashboard. But that doesn’t make him an engineer, an economist, a labor historian, a sociologist, a systems theorist, or your spiritual advisor (I hope).
I don’t even think the real problem is tech CEOs. They’re just doing what tech CEOs are paid to do. Rather, the issue is how people keep buying into it, even if it makes them nervous.
Nobody is anywhere near critical enough of the things they see on screens.