The most quick-and-dirty foresight model that futurists use is called In-casting. Anyone can do it by picturing a potential scenario in the future and answering three questions:
- What might a day’s really big win, top story in the news, look like in that scenario?
- What might be newly prohibited in that scenario?
- How would you get to work each day in that scenario? (In other words, what would change logistically.)
Answer those three questions even briefly and you’ve got a good warm start at dealing with the future.
I want to focus on the “newly prohibited” part of that.
It’s always been an interconnected world, but these days our networks of connection are being lit up with observability like never before. How will that impact society in the future? One way that seems likely is that individual actors will be prohibited from harming the larger world in some ways that they are getting away with today. Hopefully.
Admittedly, industries routinely respond to increased observability with lobbying, standards capture, or creative reporting. So transparency may be necessary but not sufficient.
Ashby’s Law (from cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby in 1956) says (roughly) that a controller must be at least as complex as the system it controls. If real-time monitoring infrastructure now exceeds the complexity of the regulations used to manage this complexity; then the system’s instruments of visibility may structurally force a redesign of the control system. Maybe!
Here are two big new examples of increased transparency on a network basis in the news today. Asking “who’s next?” would be wise.
Wild Data Center Behavior
First, in the “hey let’s be careful here” department, data center reliability. A rare level 3 alert was just issued by the North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC) – it will now register and is calling for increased reliability requirements for data centers doing more than 20 megawatts worth of computing. NERC says these data centers are too often turning their electricity consumption way up or way down on a software-defined dime, throwing the whole electric grid into disarray. Regulators used to assume there were at least minutes of lead time, now they’re seeing change on the basis of seconds.
Power plants, on the other hand, are required to be consistent and reliable with what they put into the grid. Now that individual data centers can be observed more easily than ever before, in real time and through aggregate analysis of their behavior over the last two years, they are going to have to be held responsible for their impact on the larger network they’re part of. (Latitude Media: NERC sounds the alarm that data centers risk overtaxing the grid)
So much methane leaking!
Second big network story in the news today, you’ve seen how disruptive it’s been the Straight of Hormuz can’t be used to transport gas and oil. Turns out that a new RMI analysis (Stopping Global Gas Loss in Its Tracks) has found that gas companies are leaking more gas than goes through the Straight on a normal day into the air every single day. Specifically, methane, which is 80X more harmful than CO2 as greenhouse gas. Then when you add the amount they just set on fire (in flares) instead of selling – that’s the equivalent of half the world’s exports. They do leak less when the price is high and they can sell it at a profit, but when the price is low – out it flies! And they systematically under report what they’re leaking by 3-4.5X times, RMI says.
Rude! Like, apocalyptically rude. Or, as RMI more politely puts it in order to reach a wider audience that includes otherwise insufficiently motivated people: “Energy and economic security can be rapidly reinforced by stopping gas loss.”
As the world grows ever more aware of our connections to one another, there’s a lot of stuff that people are getting away with today that I don’t think they’re going to be able to get away with in the future.
Hopefully. Now one of these is a coordination problem (data centers) and the other a commons problem (gas leaks) so there is probably not one single solution that stretches across both of those classes of issues. But a whole ensemble of solutions becomes more possible with increased observation of networks.
Watching Drilled’s debrief on the Santa Marta climate conference, which many people were hopeful for but sounds like it was maddening, does make it clear (once again) that it’s not like pointing out injustices is sufficient to change them. But visibility seems an essential ingredient.
Other News in Network Intelligence
I use Hawkeye, a market observability and network intelligence technology, to monitor my network for examples of networks being monitored. If you want to monitor your business network (and you should) in order to be aware of risks, seize opportunities, and lead – schedule a call and we can talk about it.
The Network Is Now the AI Nervous System (wow what a headline!)
Shashi Bellamkonda writes about the news that Lumen Technologies is acquiring Alkira for $475 million to combine fiber backbone infrastructure with cloud-native network software, positioning itself to manage AI agent traffic across clouds through a unified control plane. The deal reflects a fundamental shift in enterprise networking from static “plumbing” to a dynamic, policy-driven “nervous system” for coordinating cross-cloud AI workloads.
Arcadia Acquires Engie Impact to Create Unified Energy Intelligence Platform – ESG Today
This makes me think of Ramp’s insights it’s able to come up with because so many companies run payments through it, or the World Model being built at Stripe. Arcadia’s unified energy intelligence platform aggregates utility data, procurement networks, and carbon tracking to reveal hidden optimization opportunities across enterprise energy consumption, demonstrating how connecting previously fragmented organizational data networks uncovers cost and sustainability risks at scale.
ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 – From Workflows to an Autonomous Workforce
Bellamkonda again covers ServiceNow’s customer conference. He explains how ServiceNow repositioned itself from a workflow automation platform to an “AI Control Tower” that governs and executes work through autonomous agents across enterprise systems. ServiceNow says it can solve the problem of 95% of enterprises currently unable to measure AI ROI.
Those are a few of the highlights today!