My editor, Uri, is back from his time away from the desk and we had a great call in which I updated him on my discoveries and conversations over the past two weeks.
I’ve landed on a framework not by industry (because those industries might not exist in 2050), and not by ideology (because that’s probably too abstract) and not tools (AI, for instance, will be a layer that affects many ways of life and governance, etc). So what breaks us out of traditional reporting constraints but isn’t too constraining is to organize by HUMAN NEED: to live, to love, to find community, etc.
This allows me to start with an exploration of the future human itself, physiologically, the human body and its need for water/food etc and then work outward to love and connection (dating, reproduction, sex and gender, etc) and then further outward to community and housing, and further outward to humans going from place-to-place and getting goods and services (transportation).
It also globalizes the work, it isn’t America centric. All humans share the same basic needs. This gives us a much wider audience possibility for video on streaming services or on YouTube and the like. Very exciting on that front.
We’re going to get going with ideas about how humans will actually function and be made in 2050 — likely with expanded physical and mental capacity as well as lifespan. Very exciting!
The premise is the oft-cited William Gibson quote: The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. There are places where the future human is already evident or being experimented. That’s what we will begin our exploration doing/seeing. But we’ll also LOOK BACK to how predictions of thirty years ago about 2020 looked, and how they might have gotten things wrong and if so, why. It’s a nod to how even though we’re getting insight and helping people think about 2050, we also know we’ll be off the mark for reasons we aren’t anticipating.
Future Human 