Author: Elise

Hunter and gatherer. Big consumer of everything - food, drinks, media.

“How Not to Regret the Things You Build”

I am starting this reporting against a backdrop of more and more technologists saying they don’t want their children using the tools they’re making, or realizing the monsters they created. Just got pointed to this “toolkit” to help technologists “anticipate the long-term social impact and unexpected uses of the tech we create today.” Thanks to Friend Raina for the suggestion.

How do we organize our areas of inquiry?

I’m trying to figure out how to organize my exploration since “The Future” writ large is too broad. Do we organize this around people? Around the five senses? Around industries? I was thinking industries but then realized that capitalism may be over by 2050 so maybe industry is too constrained.

The Institute for the Future organizes itself research labs in these areas:

Science + Technology
Anticipate the strategic impacts of AI and robotics, virtual and augmented reality, a rapidly evolving Internet of Actions, and cutting-edge bio-engineering, alongside new materials sciences that tap the tiniest forms of matter.

Economy + Environment
Leverage the evolution of a financialized society in a marketplace of distributed currencies and in an environment where the externalized costs of the past 50 years may be rapidly internalized by every organization.

Work + Learning
Redesign the workforce to meet organizational needs as both automation and demographic shifts demand new contracts between learning machines and humans, between organizations and platforms that strive to get things done.

Citizenship + Civic Systems
Rethink the interface between your organization and a volatile civic sphere where the rules for everything from regulation to cyber-security are being rewritten in the face of growing distrust in every level of governance.

Food + Health + Well-Being
Grow your strategic leadership in a world of opportunities and pitfalls as the complex systems of health care, food production, and human microbiology transform our understanding of what it means to eat well and be well.

Arup Foresight, a consultancy that digs into future issues, has publications in these areas but they aren’t necessarily bucketed.

Just riffing here on potential directions…

Ideology: What is the governing ideology thirty years from now? (What values do people believe in, what brings them together as a society, etc)

Economy: How does the economy work? What drives it?

Power: Where are there centers of power?

Survival/Health: How much of a future human is no longer made of “natural” parts? How engineered are future humans, i.e. embryos? What has come of disease? What threatens the survival of the human race?

Environment/Earth: Does Earth sustain life as we know it? If not, where is space exploration/science at this point?

Advice from Geoff Brumfiel

Me: I’m really interested in the future human part that Ian talked about. (Geoff scans)

Geoff: I think people aren’t gonna improve themselves but their kids.

i.e. IVF, selection. Talk with Rob Stein. CRISPR, advanced IVF and some pre-implantation screening so that you can see what you’re implanting and how that’s going to shape things. It’s not like drugging your soldiers is anything new. There’s pretty effective screening against Down’s now. And so advocates worry if there arent enough of them, support structures go away. Fewer disabled kids, services become harder to come by.

As you get into tweaking for intelligence and all that, that’s a Gattaca like outcome. The other thing you gotta do is climate change. So you should find some good climate scientists to talk to about that. The challenge will be thoughtfulness without cataclysmic. I want to hear how things actually play out.

Gavin Schmidt, who people always talk to. Chris Joyce might have other suggestions. He’s good about people to not be totally doom and gloom.

“I’m sending you something I wrote 10 years ago! Like any good journalist.”

Interview Notes: Ian Bremmer

Ian Bremmer is a big brain I got to know while covering North Korea as a foreign correspondent. He speaks really quickly and he is one of the sharpest riffers on any subject so he’s one of the first voices I reached out to as I begun this reporting.  His official bio: He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. Once dubbed the “rising guru” in the field of political risk by The Economist, he teaches classes on risk as a professor at New York University. His latest book “Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism” is a New York Times bestseller.

I wanted to speak with Ian because I need a more specific frame for my exploration and I thought Ian might lay down some theses to help get me started. Boy, did he.

Atmospherics: Spoke by phone, Ian was in a car so he couldn’t record myself. My shipment from DC was getting delivered to my new house in LA so I was sitting on a cobwebby camping chair I found in a backyard shed to conduct this interview. As I was speaking with Ian, my friend Nick came over to give me cash to tip my movers, and my realtor came over to walk around and do the move-in inspection for my landlord. The movers were, meanwhile, moving. A lot was going on.

Loose Notes:

Me: I’m working on a vertical that I thought up, about the world in 2050. It will be expressed in various ways, namely my home platform, video, but many parts on audio too, and maybe I’ll write pieces or a book one day. I picked 2050 because it’s soon and yet far enough away — it’s when today’s babies will be 30.

Ian: 2050 is a long time in a world where technology is changing at an exponential rate. You know about Moore’s Law and singularity. Changes appear to happen slow but you have technological change happening exponentially, especially as they reach scale. So history doesn’t tell us anything about the future, because you have so many hockey sticks. “Weak signals become strong signals fast.”

The idea that capitalism works will be tested. Labor and capital may no longer have a relationship to one another, as we’re seeing artificial intelligence rise. “Yes the industrial revolution led to more jobs, but not for horses. Why couldn’t that happen to people?”

That might divide humanity. By 2050 you could take a subset of humanity and it might create intellectual capacity way beyond what humans are capable of now. I’m thinking memory recall, pattern recognition. As usual companies will own these ways to augment your capabilities, not everyone gets access. So then you could have one subset of intellectually capable superhumans, and one subset with today’s human capability. Human history would indicate we won’t treat the normal intellectually capable human beings as human beings.

Government, economic and socio-cultural models will be fundamentally tested. I‘d argue  the issues around geopolitical developments are much more pressing than climate change because with climate change we have a little bit of time to adapt except for the poorest parts of the world, i.e. Syria, Yemen, sub-Saharan Africa, where that’s already the case. “The last twenty to 40 years were really hopeful for humanity and that seems to be continuing, and yet there are many signs the wheels are coming off.”

There are two places the future really plays out, or is playing out already: China and Silicon Valley. “So you’re in the right place to be in California.” Who are those people, who are setting up the future? What are those systems and models they’re working under? Where is there discontinuity?

Missing Ideology of 2050

The world today has no ideology. That will change, but not sure how. What brings people together and divides them in 2050? What spurs them to action? It’s not going to be capitalism, necessarily. Nor a protestant work ethic. Or liberal-democratic values, even.

Watch the techno-utopists in the Bay Area. “There really are a lot of people up there who believe technology will fix everything.” Understand those people. What do they care about? What is the world they see? What is the reaction to that? Who is disenfranchised by this kind of thinking? Are they just anti-state people? Anti-capitalist people? Who are the anti-tech people who will bring them down, besides negative actors like Russia, Iran.

The future Humans

Humanity will change through genetic modifications. How will technolgoy be used for good/bad here? Look at soldiers who get heightened mental/physical acuity right now, who can work without sleep, tweak their personalities with drugs, etc. Look at three areas:

Changes in emotional/mental capacity
Heightened ability to work/longer attention span
Functioning without sleep

“These will be tweakable changes that a lot of people don’t have access to.” Recommends the 9.9 percent piece in The Atlantic, as he believes these people will make sure they and their children are “on the right side of the gates.”

Societal changes

What is the next thing that keeps society held together, when technology has proven so divisive to society?

Then I had to get off the phone because too many people were over. And Ian is a busy dude who had a hard stop anyway. I’ll speak with his colleague Andrew, next.

The Journey Begins

Hey y’all, I’m using this as a running repository of my reporting on this yearlong project about how we’ll live in 2050 and the ideologies, geopolitical, economic and socio-cultural reality of the world in that time. We will be wrong a lot, obviously. But this is a spot I will jot down notes from my conversations, audio, impressions and thoughts, video snippets and … really, just a real-time reporter’s notebook. This is not going to be edited, it’s raw and for my organization and lookback later. So be warned this might be messy.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton