I'm going to make an assumption here.

I'm going to assume everyone reading this has seen Back to the Future II. (For some of you, you are already humming the theme song.) Many of my students have never seen Star Wars, so I lament that there may be a few of you who don't know what I am talking about.

Back to the Future is a 80's summer blockbuster (back when they were cool) where Hill Valley highschooler Marty McFly, and "edge of town" inventor, Doc Brown, have time traveling adventures in a Delorean. It's a quinticential American movie franchise that is fun for the whole family.

In the sequel, Hill Valley has become a dystopian hellscape where casinos tower over toxic waste dumps, gangs rule the streets, and one man sits atop it all.

Biff Tannen.

Biff is the BttF inter-dimentional bad guy, the same bullying oaf who once waxed cars for a living. But in this altered timeline, Biff isn't just rich; he's untouchable.

He owns the police, the mayor, the newspapers. He murdered Marty's father and married his mother. All because an old man slipped him a sports almanac from the future.

The Almanac contains the results of every major sporting event from 1950 to 2000, and in the wrong hands, it becomes a weapon of mass wealth accumulation.

Old Biff, (played by the amazing Thomas F. Wilson), travels back to 1955 and hands a treasure trove of future knowledge to his younger self. Young Biff doesn't need to be smart, hardworking, or do anything really. He just needs to "make like a tree" and place the right bets at the right times.

For him, the result is total control. For the rest of Hill Valley, it's catastrophic.

By 1985, Biff has parlayed his gambling winnings into owning town. He's not just wealthy; he's systematically dismantled the social fabric of Hill Valley. The town square where teenagers once gathered for sock hops has been replaced by gangs with motorcycles. Biff hasn't just won, he's made it impossible for anyone else to compete.

Biff's success didn't invent anything revolutionary or provide value to society.

He simply exploited information asymmetry by knowing things others didn't know. The almanac gave him the ability to predict the future with perfect accuracy, and he used that power to extract wealth from a system that assumed everyone was operating with the same limited information.

Think, McFly, think! Let's imagine the sports almanac isn't a book.

Instead it's artificial intelligence powered by vast datasets that can predict human behavior with increasing accuracy. And just like in the movie, this power is concentrating in the hands of a few thugs who are using it to reshape society.

Unlike Biff's straightforward sports betting, today's information advantage is being weaponized in more sophisticated ways.

Algorithms are like Sports Almanac-zilla.

Algorithmic trading systems can manipulate markets in microseconds. Recommendation engines can nudge millions of people toward specific products, ideas, or political candidates. Predictive analytics can determine who gets hired, who gets loans, who gets healthcare, and who gets surveilled by law enforcement.

We're watching a handful of people accumulate power that would seriously make Biff Tannen jealous. They're not just getting rich, they're reshaping the fundamental architecture of how information flows, how markets work, and how democratic discourse happens.

Algorithms influence what billions of people see and believe every day.

Like casino-emperor Biff, AI whisperers didn't get where they are through noble contribution to society. They got there by exploiting information asymmetries and network effects – being in the right place at the right time with the right data. Sure, they might have learned to program, raise money, and train neural networks. But they have no civic purpose other than massive wealth accumulation.

And like Biff, they're using their power to make it harder for competitors to challenge them, buying up potential rivals, capturing regulatory agencies, and creating winner-take-all markets. We haven't quite reached the point where they send us all to boarding school and forcefully marry Lea Thompson, but we're pretty close...

The good news is that unlike Marty McFly, we don't need a time machine to fix this. We can still design systems and policies that prevent any single actor from appropriating control of our digital Hill Valley.

But it's going to require the same kind of bold thinking that Doc Brown brought to temporal mechanics!

First, we need to democratize the almanac. The power of AI and big data shouldn't be concentrated in the hands of a few. It should be distributed more broadly throughout society. This means investing in public digital infrastructure, supporting open-source AI research, and ensuring that smaller companies and civil society organizations have access to the tools they need to compete.

Second, we need new rules for the game. Just as we don't allow insider trading in financial markets, we should limit how predictive technologies can be used to exploit information asymmetries. The goal isn't to stop innovation, but to ensure that the benefits of technological progress are shared.

Third, we need to rebuild the institutions that make democratic competition possible. Primarily, we need limits on the political influence of tech in an AI-driven world.

There is a time line of Hill Valley where Mayor Goldie Wilson holds office. Hill Valley is a happy California town with families and good schools, and creative inventors at the edge of town. It's a place of innovation, business, and tennis clubs for Marty's parents. That's what good democracy brings. Community and opportunity.

None of that existed in Biff's reality.

Maybe with AI, future generations will create their own time DeLorean to undo the damage we're allowing to happen today. Or maybe we should consider decentralizing the networks we use before the Biffs of the world make that impossible.

Thanks for reading! I do this every week. If you vibe to the ideas I express, please subscribe or share with friends. We'll see you next time.

Nye Warburton is an educator and time traveler from Savannah, Georgia. This essay was improvised with Otter.ai, and then refined and edited with Claude Sonnet 4. Images are screen captures or generated with Stable Diffusion. For more information visit: https://nyewarburton.com

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