The future is future fitness. The advantage isn’t prediction. It’s how fast your team can notice change and respond. Pick one mindcandy prompt below. Discuss it. Decide your moves.
Do you want you a repeatable operating rhythm to sense signals early, decide priorities faster, and act with real strategic options? Click here.
Today’s prompt: The Futility of Organisations Pursuing Advanced Technologies While Holding on to Legacy Thinking.
Legacy code slows you down. Everyone knows that. What most founders miss is the bigger drag: legacy thinking. You can modernise the stack and still stay trapped because your organisation is running on outdated assumptions, like:
- Control beats speed. (So every change needs permission.)
- Certainty beats learning. (So experiments get killed early.)
- Efficiency beats adaptability. (So you optimise yesterday’s business model.)
- Data is political. (So insights are delayed, filtered, or ignored.)
- Change is a project. (So transformation “finishes” and then decay sets in.)
That’s why so many “AI transformations” quietly fail: they’re not technology programmes — they’re operating model rewrites. If the mindset doesn’t change, the tech becomes expensive theatre.
Quick test: if your best people spend more time defending decisions than improving them, you don’t have a tech problem. You have a thinking problem.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-legacy-thinking-more-dangerous-than-code-alex-mcdonnell-vx2ec/
The other prompts
My latest book about books about AI: You are the upgrade
Data, acceleration, and the future of intelligence: Lessons from 25 core books (and links to 114 other books) about AI, technology abstraction, and consciousness.
https://www.ronimmink.com/product/a-book-about-books-about-ai/
Oxford team engineer quantum-enabled proteins, opening a new frontier in biotechnology
A research team has shown it is possible to engineer a quantum mechanical process inside proteins, opening the door to a new class of quantum-enabled biological technologies.
Reality Is a Shared Hallucination—And It’s at Risk of Collapsing, Scientist Claims
Scientists are considering the idea that our perception of reality is shaped not only by our senses but by our brains creating an internal map or model of the world around us. This means our perception of what’s true or real is malleable, and we are at risk of losing our grasp on it.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a70092029/reality-is-a-shared-illusion/
Swarms of mini robots that ‘bloom’ could lead to adaptive architecture
The team’s idea was to use swarm intelligence (the collective behavior of self-organized systems such as schools of fish moving as one) to create a “living” skin for buildings.
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-swarms-mini-robots-bloom-architecture.html
New magnetic polymer enables stronger and more flexible artificial muscles in soft robotics
Researchers developed a dual cross-linked magnetic polymer that combines high stretchability with record work density.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/magnetic-polymer-artificial-muscles-soft-robotics
Building Brains on a Computer
The human brain has about 86 billion neurons. The closest thing to a “true human brain model” created thus far is an effort, from 2024, in which researchers at Fudan University in China simulated all 86 billion neurons using a 14,000-GPU supercomputer. Their model ran at 1/120th speed for about five minutes of biological time.
https://www.asimov.press/p/brains
NTT DATA Foresight Report 2026 Reveals Six Trends Shaping the Future of Technology Innovation
Human-orchestrated autonomy, embodied agency, trust, informed infrastructure, sovereign silicon ecosystems, and beyond the pursuit of narrow efficiency toward sufficiency.
https://www.nttdata.com/global/en/news/press-release/2026/january/012700
