A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow
A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow
I almost didn’t post this piece. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months, and I was about to trash it. But talking with an inspiring group of students this past week made me realize that maybe it does have some value after all.
The event was a webinar with this semester’s cohort of Millennium Fellows — a global partnership between the United Nations Academic Impact and the Millennium Campus Network that brings together over 4000 students from 48 countries to focus on the Sustainable Development Goals.
In talking with the 700+ webinar attendees, it was very clear that there’s a hunger amongst young people around the world to better understand our relationship with the future and where it’s taking us — especially in the face of transformative technologies.
And that brings me to the piece that almost didn’t make it.
This was a list of quotes from the book Future Rising that I’d compiled for when the book went to press in 2020 — one from each chapter.
It’s a sequence of quotes that captures the book’s progressive journey into our deeply complex and convoluted relationship with the future. At the time I thought it worked well as a way of reflecting on the essence of the book — and I still think it provides a tapestry of insights that, together, provide a nuanced perspective on our relationship with the future and the responsibilities this come with.
But I couldn’t see how anyone would want to wade through a list of sixty quotes about the future, hence the hesitation.
Talking with the Millennium Fellows this week though encouraged me to go back and re-read the draft. And with hindsight I think that, just maybe, there is something here that a handful of readers will find useful.
If that’s not you — my apologies.
But if it is, please read on!
PART 1: A JOURNEY INTO THE PAST
“No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”
— Isaac Asimov
1 Earthrise
“Collectively and individually, we have more control now over how our future unfolds than ever before. But our ability to envision and engineer the future comes with almost unimaginable levels of responsibility.”
2 Origins
“We now know that what we think of as ‘past’ and ‘future’ are merely the byproducts of the laws of physics that emerged after the big bang took place.”
3 Light
“Light reveals a pathway between where we are now and where we’re heading. It enables us to develop new knowledge as it illuminates the world around us.”
4 Movement
“Movement — whether the oscillation of an electron, the passing of a light beam, or the falling of a glass — marks the transition between past and present, and points toward the future.”
5 Time
“We are, at every level, creatures of time, immersed in it, obsessed by it, yet unable to control it.”
6 Entropy
“Entropy is one of those concepts that people often invoke when they try to explain life, the universe, and everything, yet is rarely understood — much to the chagrin of physicists the world over.”
7 Emergence
“We are, in effect, localized anti-entropy machines that have the ability to change the future from its default mode to something entirely different.”
8 Evolution
“DNA turned out to be an incredibly powerful entropy accelerator. Fed by heat, chemical energy, and ionizing radiation, it became the defining base code of increasingly advanced organisms that were ever more adept at making use of the energy around them and discarding it in a slightly less-usable form.”
9 Anticipation
“[Anticipation] is part of a suite of abilities that lay the foundations that enable organisms to not only envision the future, but to plan for it as well.”
10 Instinct
“Instinct relies on the future being similar to the past, and predictable based on what’s happened time and time again. But humans have put a huge wrench in this biological master plan as we’ve developed the ability to change the future faster than any evolutionary process can accommodate.”
11 Causality
“No matter how convoluted and complex the threads tying the past, present, and future become, each past action sends ripples into the future that spark a cascade of sympathetic reactions.”
12 Memory
“If we have no memory of what’s happened in the near past, we have no way of connecting effects we observe to what caused them. And this in turn means that we cannot begin to understand how our actions potentially influence the future.”
13 Learning
“Learning is what begins to carry us beyond instinct and allows us to start intentionally crafting the future.”
14 Intentionality
“Intentionality is the connective tissue between learning and outcomes. It’s the link between observing which levers in the present can be used to nudge the future in different directions, and having the wherewithal to actually pull them.”
15 Intelligence
“[E]ssential as our intelligence is to imagining and building the future, it’s surprisingly hard to pin down precisely what we mean by it.”
16 Knowledge
“When combined with our intelligence, knowledge helps us begin to connect cause with effect, and to create the models and tools that allow us to make use of these connections.”
17 Reason
“Our ability to reason is what helps us imagine the possible outcomes of events and actions, and to focus on the more plausible ones.”
PART 2: UNIQUELY HUMAN
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
18 Feelings
“While our intellect can help us envision different futures and imagine ways of creating and building them, it’s what we feel — and what we hold to be of value — that often determines the futures we are willing to invest in.”
19 Faith
“[W]e all have a remarkable faculty for constructing visions of the future that rely as much on faith as they do reason.”
20 Imagination
“[E]ven when it strays into fantasy, our imagination enables us to construct different future possibilities. And, even if they are ultimately unreachable, it can inspire us to open up pathways to futures that, without it, would remain forever undiscovered.”
21 Curiosity
“[Curiosity is] the “what-if” part of us that is fascinated by what’s around the corner and where it’ll take us.”
22 Creativity
“[C]reativity has the power to help us realize new pathways toward the future … [i]t’s what enables us to build bridges, step by step, toward the future we aspire to.”
23 Art
“Art, in all its forms, is oxygen to our creativity as we contemplate the future.”
24 Fear
“As we envision the future — whether through gut instinct, or logic and reason — it’s fear of what might occur that motivates us to try to change that future.”
25 Loss
“Loss, together with the imagined possibility of loss, ties us with a near-unbreakable cord to the future.”
26 Despair
“We may be architects of the future, but we’re also disturbingly good at stealing the futures of others when it suits us. Or worse, imprisoning them within the walls of futures we impose on them.”
27 Possibility
“From the oscillation of a fundamental particle and the passing of a ray of light, to the unzipping of a strand of DNA, the universe we inhabit is constantly changing, and with each change, nascent possibilities hang on the edge of becoming reality.”
28 Hope
“[W]ith all of the future-oriented skills and tools we’ve inherited, humans are exceptionally good at teasing out the fine threads of hope from the jaws of despair, and finding ways to futures that might, at first glance, seem unreachable.”
29 Stories
“[S]tories become the pivot point between being able to imagine the future and beginning to build it.”
30 Invention
“Just as genetic mutations provide the variation that enables organisms to adapt to the future through natural selection, our propensity to invent provides the material variation that enables us to build tangible pathways to the future in an ever-changing world.”
31 Innovation
“[J]ust as a successful journey means moving in the right direction toward a specific goal, true innovation involves coming to grips with where you are heading and why, as well as any change that this entails along the way.”
32 Design
“Through the smart use of innovation and the savvy application of design approaches, we are more adept now than at any previous point in our history in imagining what the future might be like, and how we might get there.”
PART 3: BUILDING THE FUTURE
“Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.”
―David Bowie
33 Transformation
“[W]e’re building a powerful feedback loop between what we can imagine and what we can achieve. And it’s one that is transforming the world around us as we watch.”
34 Acceleration
“[F]aith in exponential predictions ignores the reality that the pathway between present and future is neither linear nor exponential. Rather, it is deeply convoluted, with hurdles and pitfalls emerging where we least expect them, and new opportunities serendipitously emerging that confound all expectations.”
35 Transcendence
“To truly live the future we can see in our mind’s eye, we would need to find a way to break free of the biological bubble that currently limits us, and transcend our evolutionary heritage.”
36 Singularity
“If a technological tipping point like [the singularity] were to occur, all bets would be off when it comes to predicting the future.”
37 Simulation
“Believers claim that we’re getting so good at replicating reality in cyberspace that it’s only a matter of time until the virtual realities we create become better than real life.”
38 Hack
“[M]odern-day hacking is about recoding the present in order to redesign the future.”
39 Complexity
“Complexity tangles the threads between cause and effect to such an extent that some future effects simply cannot be predicted, even if we know everything we think we need to know about the causes we believe contribute to them.”
40 Hubris
“Hubris, if we’re not careful, leads to false hope. It tempts us to promise what isn’t within our power to deliver, and it encourages belief in the absence of evidence. And the danger is that, when hubris fails to deliver, hope too easily turns to doubt and despondency.”
41 Delusion
“[N]o matter how reasonable we think we are, each of us has our own delusions about the future.”
42 Perception
“[O]ur perceptions color how we think about and move toward the future. And sometimes, they lead to us getting things wrong.”
43 Deception
“[W]hat if the reality we’re building our future aspirations around is, in fact, a fake?”
44 Threat
“Threats to what we value, it turns out, have a powerful impact on how our future unfolds.”
45 Blindside
“[Blindsides] occur in the liminal space between how we imagine the future playing out and the unknowability of what’s going to happen next.”
46 Change
“[F]or all the power that our fluency in the language of change endows us with, it’s worthless if we don’t have a clear eye on where we’re heading, and why.”
PART 4: THE EDGE OF TOMORROW
“…there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
— Octavia Butler
47 Restraint
“[W]e’re more interested in indulging our predilection for short-termism and self-preservation, to the detriment of billions of people in this generation and those to come.”
48 Boundaries
“[U]nless we learn how to spot early warnings and stay clear of critical tipping points, we run the risk of, quite literally, crashing our future.”
49 Cataclysm
“[F]ickle and unpredictable as the planet we inhabit is, we have also become masters at bringing about cataclysms of our own making, and shattering futures through our own ineptitude.”
50 Outward
“What if we’re in danger of making such a mess of things on “Spaceship Earth” that we need to start thinking outside the box, and find another ship?”
51 Life
“[A]s we probe our planetary neighborhood and look to distant galaxies and beyond, we’re likely to find something that, one way or another, profoundly challenges how we think about the future.”
52 Re-Creation
“As we get closer to creating new life, whether this is biological in origin or embedded in intelligent machines, our visions of the future are going to have to adjust accordingly.”
53 Humanity
“[Our] in-built ability to envision the future, combined with a compelling desire to change it, is part and parcel of what it means to be human.”
54 Meaning
“Committing to an action often has meaning to us because it leads to a future that has greater or equal value when compared to the past.”
55 Morality
“Just as we can’t be everything to everyone in our personal relationships, we cannot design and build a future that fits everyone’s idea of what it should be like.”
56 Ethics
“[B]ecause most ethical frameworks and principles are based on the consequences of actions or decisions, they deeply affect how we work together to build the future.”
57 Empathy
“Where we have no option but to build a collective future together, empathy provides the impetus to work willingly toward a common goal.”
58 Responsibility
“[U]nless [our technological] power is wielded responsibly, there is a growing likelihood that, in our blind ambition to build a technologically advanced future, we will overstep the mark and be left with a social and environmental train wreck.”
59 Stewardship
“[W]hether through some random quirk of the universe, or by some inscrutable divine intervention, we’ve been given the gift of being able, not only to imagine and design the future, but to take joy from building a future that values, nurtures, and celebrates others.”
60 Futurerise
“[W]hat will be the equivalent of this generation’s Earthrise? What vision will inspire us to leave the ruts of narrow-mindedness and selfish short-termism, and strive together to build a better future?”