Posts Tagged ‘futures’
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”*…
… nor, perhaps, as widely read as it should be. “Urubos” is here to help…
The Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.
The catalog connects stories (novels, novellas, short stories, films) to the speculative ideas they explore: thought experiments about technology, governance, biology, society, and more. Every idea is tagged with domains, scenario types, and outcome types so you can filter by the kind of future you are thinking about.
How to use it:
- Search by title, author, synopsis keywords, or idea descriptions
- Filter by domain (AI, biotech, climate, space, governance…), scenario type, outcome, decade, or series
- Browse ideas to find transferable thought experiments, then follow links to the stories that explore them
- Browse stories to see what speculative ideas a particular work contains
- Book Club discussions (marked with 📖) offer section-by-section roundtable analyses by AI personas modeled on SF authors
- What-If Query (via the What-If Query page/link) lets you describe a real-world scenario in plain text and get ranked matching ideas
The archive is designed for decision-makers in government, industry, and NGOs who want to widen their thinking by surfacing fictional precedents for novel real-world challenges…
Over 275 ideas, which cluster into 20 different “domains,” explored in over 1,900 stories, via over 3,500 links…
Mapping real-world scenarios to the science fiction stories that explored them first: “Extrapolated Futures Archive“
* William Gibson
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As we ponder prescience, we might spare a thought for Charles Hoy Fort, the prolific chronicler of paranormal phenomena; he died on this date in 1932. Fort collected accounts of frogs and other strange objects raining from the sky, UFOs, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, stigmata, psychic abilities, and the like, publishing four collections of weird tales and anomalies during his lifetime: Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). So influential was Fort among fellow-questers that his name has become an adjective, “Fortean,” often applied to unexplained events… The Truth is Out There…
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”*…
Your correspondent is headed onto the road again; so, with apologies, regular service will be suspended until on or about May 17…
… In the meantime, the remarkable Henry Farrell offers sage advice…
Last Thursday, Combinations (a publication of the RadicalxChange foundation), published a review essay that I wrote on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. I’m not going to repeat here what I say there; it’s available for free, so if you want to read it, just click on the link! [and one should read it]. Instead, I want to make the implicit argument explicit.
One of the big problems of American politics – and of politics in plenty of places elsewhere – is that we lack usable and attractive futures. The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause.
Because I am weird, I think that the most immediately useful aspect of Klein and Thompson’s book is not its specific argument about how to get to the future. It is that the book has the promise to reorient the presentists around the prospect of an attractive future, and the different paths you might take to get there. On the one hand, as Dan Davies says (riffing on post-punk philosophizing), if you don’t have a dream then how’re ya gonna have a dream come true? On the other, no single dream is capable of foretelling the One True Path To Abundance (or, for that matter, any other desirable goal) so you want to have useful arguments between people with different dreams, and different plausible paths…
[Farrell discusses the book and its reception– the myriad reactions it has occasioned– puts the debate into an intellectualy historical context, then pivots to his advice…]
… One terrifying prospect for the U.S. is that the Trump faction wins again in 2028. Another is that the Democrats regain power – but that like Keir Starmer’s government, they trap themselves in a vicious cycle where universal expectations of less generate factionalism and political stasis, which further deepen those universal expectations.
That is why I think that abundance is important as a goal. We need to aim towards some version of abundance to escape the trap we’re in. That too, is why I think that disagreement about how to reach that goal over the next couple of years is valuable in two ways.
First, no faction on the left or right has any monopoly on the wisdom about how to get there. It is only through argument – and experimentation in those bits of the federal system and local politics where experimentation is possible – that we can figure out what to do when we can do it. Second, if we can get to a place where the major argument is about how to get towards abundance, not just between center left and centrists, but across the political spectrum, we – for a very broad value of we – will be halfway towards winning the fight we need to win. Far more is politically possible when we are disagreeing over how to get to an attractive future, than when we are struggling to ensure that we are as close to the top of the pile as possible in a horrible one.
We need usable futures that can orient current politics in fruitful ways. Abundance – in the broadest sense of that term – is the closest thing to a common denominator across such futures that I know of…
Abundance not as an agenda but a goal: “We need usable futures,” from @himself.bsky.social.
For contrast, pair with: “Trump’s futurism: Elon’s rockets and fewer dolls for ‘baby girl’” (and Part 2) from @adamtooze.bsky.social.
* Franklin D. Roosevelt
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As we opt for optimism, we might send cautious birthday greetings to an example of what less-inclusive abundance can yield: John Warne “Bet-a-Million” Gates; he was born on this date in 1855. A Gilded Age industrialist and gambler, Gates was among the first salesmen of barbed wire. He parlayed his success into the manufacture of of the fencing; and success at that, into the manufacture fo steel. (He was instrumental in changing the steel industry’s production methods from the Bessemer process to the open hearth process.) He was the president of Republic Steel and later, of the Texas Company (an oil concern later known as Texaco) and of the Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Gulf Railroad.
Gates developed a taste– and a talent– for gambling at a young age. In his prime, he was known to host raucous, days-long poker games in his permanent suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. His nickname derived from a 1900 horserace in England on which he wagered $70,000 and was widely-reported to have won $1,000,000 (though it seems likely he won “only” $600,000).
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play”*…
We all know that our behavior has to change if we’re going to continue healthily and happily to inhabit the earth. And we all have a few ideas of changes we can make to make a difference. But they are mostly incremental and remedial. What might a society designed to have a healthy relationship to its environment look like? Spencer R. Scott has some guidelines…
Many see the Industrial Revolution as its own kind of Renaissance. Over the past 300 years it enabled an accumulation of wealth that the world has never before seen. Yet, industrialization and the fossil-fuels that aided its growth did not come without a price. As a recent report warns, six of nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded. This unprecedented material abundance is only enjoyed by some, yet has polluted and put at risk the whole world’s air, rivers, oceans, forests, and food, and has caused two of humanity’s largest crises: climate change and the biodiversity crisis. The era of the industrial civilization is foreclosing on itself, and many are now pointing to the need for an ecological civilization to take its place. This would be a true Renaissance, where human and ecological flourishing alike are at the center of everything we do.
Before industrialization, humanity existed in an agricultural civilization during which productivity was low and people were organized around meeting basic needs. The industrial civilization ushered in a new high-productivity era that inevitably affected peoples’ values, lifestyles, beliefs, and the institutions that governed them. An ecological civilization will similarly necessitate a major paradigm shift. As Jeremy Lent asserts in “What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?”, we need “a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior.”
From Latin, ecology means “knowledge of home” and ecological means the “applied knowledge of home.” While the old industrial system is characterized by an indifference to how life on this planet works, an ecological civilization operates with ecological principles at its core – with behaviors, values, goals, and institutions organized around the applied knowledge of life on Earth.
In her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus outlines some of Life’s Principles here on Earth:
Life runs on sunlight. Life rewards cooperation. Life builds from the bottom up. Life banks on diversity. Life recycles everything. Life builds resilience through diversity, decentralization, and redundancy. Life optimizes rather than maximizes. Life selects for the good of the whole system. In short, life creates the conditions conducive to life.
Inspired by Benyus’ Life’s Principles and the work of sustainable development scholar, Jiahua Pan, I created 6 ingredients for an ecological civilization…
Six ingredients for a more resilient future: “An Ecological Civilization is the Renaissance We’ve Been Waiting For,” from @SpencerRScott.
* James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
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As we think systemically, we might spare a thought for Guillaume Amontons; he died on this date in 1705. A physicist who made formative contributions to the understanding of friction, he was also an accomplished designer of scientific instruments– perhaps most notably, the air thermometer, which relies on increase in volume of a gas (rather than a liquid) to measure temperature. His approach led to the emergence of the concept of “absolute zero” (long before the advent of cryogenics). These days, there’s more attention at the other end of the scale…
“Our goal at DOOM! will be to consider a plurality of futures and then doing everything that we can to prevent nuclear war, oblivion and ruin”*…
Readers may recall a recent post featuring an essay written by GPT-3, a machine-learning language model: “Are Humans Intelligent?- a Salty AI Op-Ed.” Our friends at Nemesis (@nemesis_global; see here) have upped the ante…
The end of trends has been heralded by various outlets for years (see here, here and many more on our Are.na channel).
But COVID time is crazy. We had a hunch that the hype cycle itself was finally in its true death throes – related to economic collapse, popular uprising, a general sense of consumer fatigue, and the breakdown of a consensus reality in which such trends could incubate. Since trends are a temporal phenomenon (they have to start, peak, fade away, typify a time, bottle the zeitgeist, etc.) we began with a simple survey about the breakdown of narrative time, first circulated through our personal social media accounts…
Then we ran the same questions through an online survey distributed to 150 randomly chosen respondents, deployed in collaboration with General Research Laboratories. These responses, which will likely appear in a future memo, ranged from deeply personal to millenarian to an extreme form of ‘new optimism’.
Then our process took a crazier turn. In July 2020, OpenAI released GPT-3 for beta testing – a natural language processing system (colloquially, an “AI”) that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. K Allado-McDowell, writer, co-founder of the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI and friend of Nemesis, had started doing experimental collaborative writing with GPT-3. By exploring its quirks, K was already building an empirical understanding of GPT-3’s ability to articulate the nature of consciousness, memory, language, and cosmology… We were drawn to the oracular quality of the text generated by GPT-3, and became curious about how it could interact with the material we had gathered.
With the generous help of K – who had quickly become a skilled GPT-3 whisperer – we began feeding it our survey results, in the form of essayistic synopses that summarized the key points of the respondents and quoted choice answers. We left open-ended, future-facing sentence fragments at the end of these and let GPT-3 fill in the rest, like a demented version of Gmail’s suggestive text feature….
As we worked, GPT-3 quickly recognized the genre of our undertaking: a report concerned with the future written by some kind of consultancy, expert group, or think tank. So it inadvertently rebranded us, naming this consultancy DOOM!…
What follows is a text collaboratively composed by Nemesis, GPT-3, K Allado-McDowell and our survey respondents, but arguably authored by none of us, per se. Instead you could say this report was written by the “third mind” of DOOM! which spontaneously arose when we began to process this information together with the conscious goal of generating predictions about the future. The outputs of our GPT-3 experiments have been trimmed, edited for grammar, minorly tweaked and ordered into numbered chapters….
An AI-written “report of the future,” eminently worthy of a close reading at (at least) two levels: “The DOOM! Report.”
* GPT-3’s renaming of and mission statement for its “client”
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As we welcome contemplate centaurs, we might we might send freaky (if not altogether panicked) birthday greetings to John W. “Jack” Ryan; he was born on this date in 1926. A Yale-trained engineer, Ryan left Raytheon (where he worked on the Navy’s Sparrow III and Hawk guided missiles) to join Mattel. He oversaw the conversion of the Mattel-licensed “Bild Lili” doll into Barbie (contributing, among other things, the joints that allowed “her” to bend at the waist and the knee) and created the Hot Wheels line. But he is perhaps best remembered as the inventor of the pull-string, talking voice box that gave Chatty Cathy her voice.
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