The future was a great invention: let's make it worth it.

One of the most prestigious classes you can attend at Stanford University is "Inventing the Future", a highly interactive course to explore how to predict and invent the future - and, more importantly, why it is important - by focusing on eight different frontier technologies: Robotics, AI/ML, Genomics, Autonomous Vehicles, Digital Manufacturing, Industrial IoT, and VR/AR. The class was inspired by Alan Kay, legendary computer scientist and pioneer of the Graphic User Interface, the dominant paradigm we all use to interact with computers and devices, and takes its name from something Kay famously said: “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

The thesis of the Inventing the Future class is that we are all responsible for inventing the future we hope we, and our descendants, will experience: our actions, innovations and decisions today are what determine whether the world we will live in in the future will lean more towards an utopian or a dystopian scenario.

In the tech world we spend a lot of time time envisioning what the future might be, to generate the vision that will guide us in our innovation journey. Interestingly though, we also spend very little time thinking about what the future actually is, and just take it for granted. It's something not at all intuitive to us, but "the future" is not a concept that has accompanied humanity since the beginning, but the future was at some point literally invented. The notion of how our society would change and how people would live in new ways in times to come is something that started to surface only in the 18th century. During the Enlightenment, along with the humanism, it was developed the idea of progress, the thought that things wouldn’t necessarily just carry on in the way always had been, but actually we could all work to make them better, discover more, find better ways to live, and eventually thrive.

In other words, what the Enlightenment brought us, was the idea the status quo wasn’t inevitable anymore, as people could affect meaningful and long lasting change, if they meant it. And then, along with the industrial revolution, came technology; and, with it, the fast, radical and dramatic change brought to the lives of most people made it the perfect embodiment of progress. Soon after, modern Science started to gain momentum, developing more theories, predictions and experiments to prove them, and finally Science Fiction has evolved in the last century, from a mere way to channel the anxieties of our age, to an instrument we use to give form to our vision of the future, giving birth to that imagination-research-development flywheel that still propels our modern world forward.

We discover things because we have imagined them first, we invent them because we have dream about them beforehand. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, has been quoted saying that his goal with the futuristic universe he created was to show humanity that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived. And the latest iteration of Roddenberry's world, the new Strange New Worlds series - these words spoken by the protagonist tell us that the vision is still there:

"Earth. That dust and sky is my hearth, but the Enterprise is my home. We can go forward together, knowing that whatever shadows we bring with us, they make the light all the brighter".

Disclaimer

What's above represents?my personal views?and not the opinion or policy of my employers or any other company, organization or individual I can be associated with.

The facts expressed here belong to everybody, the quoted statements belong to their respective authors, the opinions only to me: the distinction is yours to draw...