A Brief History of the Future
Futures for the PBS crowd
Something pretty remarkable just happened in the Futures world: PBS released a six-part documentary on Futures called A Brief History of the Future. I’m not surprised that it made no dent in popular consciousness (though it would have been nice), but it barely made waves in the Futures communities that I’m a part of. This seems like a missed opportunity - this may be the highest-profile and friendliest look at the profession since The Futurists in 1967. The program operates at two levels simultaneously: as an exploration of possible near-term global futures1, and as a demonstration of some basic foresight techniques. I don’t know what plans PBS has for the show going forward, but I would love to see it decomposed into clips that could be used to teach about specific ideas and possibilities.
Possible Futures
The main thrust of the series is that we seem to have lost the confidence in and excitement about the future that was abundant in the US in prior decades. Specifically related to climate change, democratic backsliding, and the fraying of the social fabric, there’s a danger of resignation or even nihilism overtaking our ability to make meaningful progress on today’s problems. The show, then, shows the little pieces of a better future peeking through into the present, to advance the viewer’s ability to think about the future with increased imagination and sense of agency2.
Here’s a list of the technologies and processes explored: nuclear fusion, kelp farming for food and bioplastics, ocean plastic reclamation, vertical fungus farms for food and packaging, VR/AR for physical therapy and exposure therapy, AI, circular economics, cultivated meat, rewilding, bionic enhancements, synthetic biology, generative art, deliberative democracy, smart grids, 3D printing houses, coral farming, geothermal energy, carbon capture, and open-source emissions detection. It’s a lot! One of the bigger questions the show explicitly tackles is how our conception of what it means to be human might change in the future - not only questions of where humans end and technology used to enhance humans begins3, but what it would look like for some descendant of today’s artificial intelligence to be considered human.
Because this is a TV production, these are all communicated by doing on-site interviews and demos of the projects and technologies. The show visits lots of cities in the US and locations in Canada, but also skips across the globe, with visits to Dubai4, Japan, Morocco, India, and lots of locations in Europe. I did have a bit of a smirk imagining all the crew and equipment flying across the globe to interview people about climate change and imagining how much Greta Thunberg would disapprove.
Futures Tools
The other thing that A Brief History of the Future covers in parallel to this discussion of what the future might bring is a look at what experts around the world are doing to bring people (temporarily) into the future. There are simple techniques, like asking someone “if [whatever] were a 10-chapter book, what chapter are we in now?”, to legal approaches like Wales creating a Future Generations Commissioner to draft goals for the future that have to be considered in policy discussions, to exercises like role-playing as future citizens to make proposals for local decisions, to death meditation and acceptance5 as a way to transform the way we think about the future6.
The biggest potential outcome here is to lengthen the time horizon that people use to organize their lives and society, making them willing to embark on generational projects similar to the cathedrals that communities in the Middle Ages would build over centuries for the benefit of descendants that we will never meet. One of the strategies proposed for this is to incorporate non-Western perspectives that do this better; for example, having indigenous groups help drive land management closer to the way they had been doing it for generations before colonization. Another tradition that can expand the field’s scope of thought is Afrofuturism, which the program explicitly positions as more than just a cool aesthetic to be mined by Hollywood. When people spend most of their day convinced that the world is ending, Afrofuturism shows what’s possible when a people already experienced the “end of the world” and have the opportunity to decide what to build on the other side of that.
Side note here: the more people talk about how this is a “decisive moment in human history” and “what we do now will affect how humanity develops over the next several centuries”, the more it starts sounding like the “this is the most important election in a generation” rhetoric I hear every four years. I think there are very important decisions to be made and work to be done in our day, but I don’t know that they are significantly more important than the decisions made during the Cold War to prevent nuclear escalation, or decisions that the next generation might have to make about bioengineering. It seems like there’s a really strong “present bias” that our minds create for a very practical reason: from our perspective, the past is fixed and so it’s hard to imagine it being any other way, the future is murky and so the choices are unclear, and the present is the seat of all action and agency; thus, we attribute the way things will always feel in the moment to this moment in time. I assume this is something that has a lot of associated research, but I don’t think I’ve seen it.
Futurists
One of the phrases I heard early on in my studies7 is “there’s no front door” to Futures. A Brief History of the Future repeatedly illustrates this by showing people doing futures work with a huge array of titles: journalist, economist, architect, neuroscientist, designer, etc. This is one of the coolest parts of the show, though it’s never explicitly mentioned: the lion’s share of the best futures work is done by passionate individuals, using their existing skills to improve the community they care about, augmented by ideas and techniques from the Futures field.
However, there are several people identified specifically as futurists, and I think it’s a good opportunity to look at their educations and how they’ve put a life together:
Ari Wallach - he’s the host and walks the audience through this whole journey. He has an undergraduate degree in peace and conflict studies from UC Berkley. He has mostly worked with nonprofits, political organizing, and wrote the book Longpath, one-upping the better-known work of Roman Krznaric by focusing on being a “great ancestor”.
Leah Zaidi: I wrote about Leah last February in the context of her work about taking dystopian images of the future seriously, especially when trends are pointing in that direction. She has a Masters in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD, a design school in Toronto, and runs a boutique foresight consulting company with corporate and government clients.
Pupul Bisht: I wrote in the fall about Pupul’s use of traditional Indian storytelling techniques to conduct futures exercises that were more participatory and inclusive. She has the same OCAD degree as Leah, and is currently running foresight for a small non-profit grappling with the existential threats to humanity’s future.
Ytasha Womack: Ytasha is part of the Afrofuturism movement and strikes me as one of those artistic people who just try to catch as many of their ideas as possible and instantiate them in the world before they float away: she writes books (fiction and non-fiction), makes movies, teaches dance, and probably does a lot of other things. She has an undergraduate media/arts degree from Clark Atlanta University, and a master certificate from Johnnie Colemon.
Amy Webb: Similar to Leah, Amy runs a foresight firm catering to big enterprises and governments. Amy has an undergraduate political science / economics degree from Indiana University and Masters in Journalism from Columbia.
As I start thinking about how to position and market myself after my degree is finished, I’m paying a lot more attention to how people are making Futures into thriving careers. I was a little disappointed to see that none of these were connected to the Houston foresight program, but, as A Brief History of the Future makes clear, there’s plenty of need and space for futures thinking and lots of space at the table.
Probably the biggest bias in the show is ignoring the deep futures work that big companies are doing with in-house and consultant futurists. I understand the direction, since the goal is more on futures for the planet, society, etc, but it contributes to the confusion (which I used to have) about how futurists make money if they spend all their time talking on NPR about eating bugs.
Once again, this is my own way of framing the value of foresight, echoing Wendy Schultz’s comments about “teaching people to daydream effectively”.
Not that this is a new thing - the boundary that has been in flux since the first prosthetic limbs and eyeglasses, and has continued as we’ve offloaded things like navigation and direction to machines - but brain-computer interfaces, advancing pharmaceuticals, and other kinds of enhancements are going to bring the issue into sharper relief. We are already seeing some of this in the assertions of the Enhanced Games.
Nice cameo for the Museum of the Future in this one.
Notably absent from the discussion: if the Silicon Valley billionaires really do crack the code on aging and death becomes preventable more or less indefinitely, what are the implications? It would ripple through religion, the job market, housing, the whole senior care industry, the way we think of family, etc.
This makes me think about the death doula work of Juli Rush, one of my favorite people from the Houston program. There’s also a scene in the show where Ari Wallach is teaching children in a class setting about futures, which brings my mind to the cool work Juli does teaching futures to middle school students. Basically, Juli’s great!
I’m pretty sure this was during my interview with John Sweeney, but he said it like he was quoting the zeitgeist.