8NOVEMBER 2022OPINIONIN MYDIGITAL THINKING IN INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT...AND BEYONDBy Enrico Massignani, Head of Risk, GeneraliLinear thinking. This is our "original sin" in the survival of the fittest competition. This is our main risk today. Millions of years of evolution has trained us to think linearly in a world that is not. Disagree? It's just a matter of perspective. Let's do a short experiment. Take a few seconds and try to imagine yourself 10 years from now. Where are you? What are you doing? How is the world around you? Done? Most people would think about a world and a personal situation very similar to the current.Now, imagine that you've just boarded a 7-hourflight from New York JFK to London Heathrow. You just sat comfortably (if you're travelling business or first class) in your seat, and you're sipping a drink. Loaded in your tablet, you've a hyperco-pressed digital recording of 4 million years of human history minute by minute. The plane takes off, you press play, and then press fast-forward5 billion X rate to shrink 4 million years into 7 hours.For the initial 5 hours, you see great apes learning to stand on two feet. Boring! Then suddenly, as you're flying over Ireland when your video file clocktells you're about 1million years ago, you see a man starting a fire with a stick like Tom Hanks did in Castaway: mankind learned to control fire!From that point on, events start to accelerate; man learns to build his own shelters, to plant crops, inventsa few tools....invents language!As your airplane starts to approach Heathrow, while it lowers down, you see London from the window. You're about 1 minute to land, and your videofile clock shows 5'000 years ago: man learns to write! In the one minute that follows, the story of mankind unravels at an incredible speed: the Egyptians building the pyramids, Greek philosophers teaching in Athens, the Romans conquering Europe, the Middle Age, the discovery of the Americas, the French revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the two World Wars and .... at just 170 milliseconds Enrico Massignani
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