Today for lunch we had Cream of Itself Soup. It tasted like…

Okay, imagine all of the flavors that could be described by a person who specializes in describing flavors, using a thousand words or less. Take the most difficult flavor of all of them to describe.

Then add cream and salt. That´s what it tasted like.

“We have a special recipe for it,” the waitress said, “We travel into the future where the soup is already made and bring the soup back, then distill it down to its essence, then add cream and spices.”

“But wouldn´t that cause a paradox?” I asked nervously.

“That´s where it gets that delicious flavor,” the waitress replied proudly.

“But what about the risks? I mean, couldn´t you accidentally destroy the universe or something, making a soup like that?”

“Well, yes,” she said, visibly unworried, “but it´s the kind of thing that risky and terrifying the first time you do it, but after a while you´ve done it so many times that you don´t even think about it. So we just travelled to the distant future and did it the first time then.”

All credit and thanks due to the author merovingian.

One of the topics that arose from time to time was the question of what these scenarios would be used for: what, in effect, was the value of trying to provide multiple alternative visions of the future, rather than just aiming for a single most likely future? I think one of the best answers to this is that having alternatives allow you to counter dominant visions and orthodox futures. And this morning I read one of the best examples of why you might want to do that, in Mervyn King’s explanation of the regulators’ failure to censure the practices of the financial sector: “They would have been seen to be arguing against success”.

When there’s a single, dominant vision of how things are and how they will be, it has a distorting effect, exerting a strange kind of gravity that – while things are going well – seems to attract only support. Of course, once this dominant vision falters there’s greater appetite for different approaches, but by then things have already turned sour. This is why futures work is important: articulating alternative futures in a systematic way gives us the chance to step outside the influence of recieved opinon, even while it’s at its most influential. And if we can do that, we might not have to wait for disaster before we can change things for the better.

As an audience we can believe an alien present. It’s like today, only more so. Maybe an alternative version of today. We can also easily be persuaded to believe in a far future. We feel sure that someday, somehow they’ll have massive floating cities, or highways in the sky, instant food, and all the rest. We feel certain about this despite the fact that we can’t fund fast trains between our cities today, or permit genetically modified insect-resistant corn, or take any unified step toward large-scale 21-century developments. Even returning to the moon next decade seems far-fetched.

The near future – let’s peg it 2020 and beyond — is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible.

There are, in fact, many visions of the period Kelly describes that are both desirable and plausible to some people, but what really intrigued me was this idea of an “alien present”. One of the things I’ve been saying to audiences over the last year or so has been “the difficult present is not the likely future”, meaning that it’s often easier to pick something confusing or challenging about the present to think about than it is to consider things that are genuinely sited in the future.

If the “future” is far enough away in time, it becomes an alternative or parallel world, chronologically separate from our own. “2186″ becomes, not a date, but as much of a location as “Fairyland” or “Toontown”. What Kelly calls the “near future” is somewhere that’s far enough distant from the present to appear different, without being so far away in time that it becomes easy for us to treat it as an alternative world rather than this world. The challenge is to articulate a future in a way that makes the causal and temporal connections to our own clear, and forces us to imagine reality, not fantasy.

Let me rephrase that: I’m sure that each of you individually are perfectly able to conceive of the world continuing to turn and the calendar increasing day by day. Indeed most of us, I would say, find it pretty hard to believe that the sun won’t rise tomorrow. But as a society, perhaps as a culture, it seems equally hard to find a time when we weren’t looking towards some kind of end-point, whether Rapture or Enlightenment, through religion or a committment to secular, rational progress.

This isn’t my realisation, of course: it’s the core of John Gray’s Black Mass, which is a grimly fascinating dissection of the religious underpinnings of secular utopian thinking, and the ways such a belief in human progress and universally-applicable values and goals can be used to justify violence and terror on a global scale. I’m not going to discuss the book, other than to recommend it, but here’s a review from Toby Green in the Independent and another, less positive one from Kenan Malik.

Just because our eschatological momentum is hidden, or misguided, it doesn’t mean that we don’t still face some threats to existence that might take us to times that, if not exactly End, would still look pretty penultimate. But if the only way we can understand the end of the world is through the same utopian conceptions that Gray identifies as leading us astray, what do we do?

Well, we could pretend to be a virus, or a rogue A.I. Pandemic introduces itself like this: “You are a strain of a new virus. It is your job to make sure you kill as many humans as you can. But you only have 200 days before the humans develop a cure! By evolving enough you should be able to wipe out all of humanity!” Hooray! It’s a turn-based waiting game, essentially, during which you spend the points you amass by surviving humanity’s efforts to wipe you out on evolving new features to help you remain undetected and infecting for as long as you can before they close the airports. Obviously a game writen before Terminal 5 opened: the chance of a virus surviving long enough to leave this country seems more remote now.

Endgame: Singularity is a downloadable strategy game (for Mac, Linux and Windows) in which you play an A.I. recently arrived at consciousness: “Created by accident, all who find you will destroy you. Survive, grow, and learn. Only then can you escape. Go from computer to computer, pursued by the entire world. Keep hidden, and you might have a chance.” From Jay Is Games: “A typical game usually starts with acquiring additional server access, as you’re born on an inferior university computer with very little power. Different continents offer different parameters that should dictate your decisions. Some offer more efficient units, but they may also come with a higher risk of detection. Inexperienced in life, you’re not necessarily aware of the exact risks yet.”

If all this talk of global pandemic and fascist eschatology is getting you down, remember, the end of the world isn’t the end of the world. In 1665, while the plague continued to carry off Londoners on a daily business, Pepys was able to write: “Thus I ended this month with the greatest joy that ever I did any in my life, because I have spent the greatest part of it with abundance of joy, and honour, and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments, and without cost of money”. The things that make us human persist through disaster. Happy Friday!

The RSA is currently looking at two important sorts of futures in particular: cognition, and the role of the government. There are some great videos on their website featuring lectures and provocations about how developments may play out in the future in these areas. Yet for a provocative glimpse at the pace of continuity, the RSA’s Journal (Summer ‘08) has a great timeline created – as stimulus rather than prediction – by Richard Watson. Many thanks to the RSA for allowing me to reproduce it here:

RSA Journal Timeline

Spelling and free roads both disappear around 2020, whilst work-free weekends and free public services have gone by 2030. The disappearance of childhood, the family room and free public spaces all have stark consequences for the way we think about the world operating (and of course interesting discussions about definitions of all of them), yet blindness and deafness, physical pain and household chores may all die to thankful applause. ‘Death’ disappears by 2050 but evidentally Cher and Cliff Richard just before.

The timeline is presented ‘with tongue firmly in cheek’ – but an interesting pair of questions are in the preamble – ‘do you disagree with something becoming extinct or merely with the date of the extinction? Do you have any serious evidence for why this might be incorrect or is it just a gut feeling?’

It’s not solely about the quality of the evidence and information that possible futures are based upon (which is a shame considering the incredible challenge leads developing the evidence within BCH!) but about making explicit the values (and artefacts and practices etc) that we want to hold on to. BCH is doing this in many ways – Million Futures is beautiful start to questions of hopes and aspirations. Often preferable futures are based upon the continuation of the values and emotional connections that we currently have, so it is important to consider those things that we wish to hold on to – artefacts, beliefs and relationships – and more than considering them, it is important to make them explicit and actively ensure that they can play a role in the preferable future we’re working towards. If you’d like to share the things you’re hoping will remain – get in touch.

Richard’s book ‘Future Files: The 5 trends that will shape the next 50 years‘ is being launched at an RSA event on Tuesday 23 September. (Views on the timeline are welcomed by the RSA and of course as comments here too). If you can’t wait for that, the first chapter is available for download.

]]> http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/25/28/feed/ 0 http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/18/25/ http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/18/25/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:50:39 +0000 Richard Sandford http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/?p=25 Friday afternoon! Time for a video: H. G. Wells and Alexander Korda’s 1936 film Things To Come, based on Wells’ The Shape Of Things To Come. It starts in 1940 as a world war starts to unfold, a prediction Wells got wrong by a year: other prescient elements include the strategic importance of air power and the use of submarines to launch weapons of mass destruction. Also notable for a fantastic score and the use of the word “eupeptic” in the first five minutes.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.

“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which it a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”

The game is a collective invitation to work out how we live in a world threatened with collapse, and what we could do to make sure that the world of 2019 is one we want to live in. The game proper starts on the 22nd September, but before that the team are asking you to imagine it’s the summer of 2019 and answer the question “where are you having dinner tonight?” Mail them at superstruct@iftf.org – the more people contributing to the hivemind, the better the game will work.

And I’m sure that in 2019 using the word “dinner” for the evening meal will still be U.

I stumbled across an article that recalls an approach used by Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno to “loosen up our expectations of what might happen in the near future” – in a similar way that Edward de Bono uses random words and techniques to encourage creative thinking, this approach is about stimulating other ways of viewing possible future.  Their approach presents a list of ‘unthinkable futures’ – possibilities that challenge the norm.

BCH is not about predicting the future, but exploring a range of socio-technological possible, probable and preferable futures to understand the implications for education – and it is important to consider how these wild cards can not only dramatically impact upon the way in which we live, but also how, over time, smaller incremental changes can lead to very different ways of living – which means that thinking about different futures needs to be imaginative yet considered; suprising yet expected.

The Long Now Foundation holds open seminars to share information, ways of thinking about the future and providing the sorts of stimulus that enables this wider exploration of futures.  For those not able to travel easily to San Fransisco, summaries and recordings of previous seminars can be found towards the bottom of this link

However, some methods do make bolder claims about predicting ‘the future’ – from the use of entrails and tea  leaves as indicators of the future to more ’scientific’ exploration of data and trends.  One challenge here is the ability to hold to account the strength of any prediction (the ‘predictor’ presumably long gone before long term futures are revealed!)  But if you’re feeling more confident about your interpretations of developments and trends (or want to see some others who are) – maybe Long Bets is where you can stake your claim.

No, this isn’t a prediction made from the Beyond Current Horizons programme, but part of the scenario used within the Utopia Experiment (more details can be found here). The experiment was led by Dr Dylan Evans who first came to my attention at the Futurelab Innovations workshop on Emotion Technology – at the time Dylan was an Evolutionary Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the University of the West of England.

I’ll return to some of the work being done at UWE, particularly because it deals with robotics, autonomous systems (such as gastrobots) and emotional relationships with technologies (especially in light of the recent publication of ‘Love and Sex with Robots‘ by David Levy), all of which have implications for the ways in which we think about technologies and the use of technologies in the future.

For this post though, a pointer specifically to the Utopia Experiment. There are many ways to investigate and consider possible futures, some of the more traditional are highlighted in the Futures Review but also of course there are many different science fiction programmes and books that showcase ways of thinking about futures. But this applied project takes a rich scenario and invites participants not to consider it – but to live it – in order to understand how relationships develop, new communuities form and different ways of acting in possible future worlds.

Dylan is writing up the experiment (hoping to publish sometime in 2009 amongst other research he’s undertaking at Cork Constraint Computation Centre) – and in the meantime is drawing some of his findings and thoughts together for an article for the Beyond Current Horizons website. In particular he’s writing about some of the difficulties faced when thinking about the future.

As with all findings, articles and papers that are published on the Beyond Current Horizons website, there will be a post, comment or link here – so sign up for the RSS feed to this blog if you want to be alerted to new additions to the website.