GodMind AI

Most institutions are built for the pressures of the current quarter or the current year. The board wants to see revenue growth. The investors want to see user metrics. The market wants to see competitive positioning. And all of those things are real and legitimate. An institution that cannot sustain itself in the present has no future to build toward. But the institutions that shape their fields for generations, the ones that become permanent reference points in the landscape of human achievement, are the ones that were designed with a longer horizon in mind from the very beginning. Not as an afterthought. Not as a paragraph in a mission statement. As a structural principle embedded in every consequential decision the institution makes. The economist John Maynard Keynes observed that in the long run we are all dead, and he was making a point about the limitations of long-range economic forecasting. But the historian Will Durant, surveying the full sweep of human civilization, observ...