Future Today #032 - Tele-driving, Dreams, States 4.0, Brian Eno

Welcome to Future Today!?A newsletter for those curious about social innovation, disruptive technologies and futures studies. In it I will share weekly blog articles, interesting links and recommendations for books, movies, series and courses.

?? A Futurist’s Guide to Preparing Your Company for Constant Change. As we look back, 2020 and much of 2021 were a wake-up call for how much and how quickly change can happen. But they were also a warm-up for what’s ahead — not necessarily another pandemic with multiple variants, of course, but flux of every imaginable stripe. Here are four steps leaders can take to prepare their organizations to thrive amid constant change.

?? Corporations want to put advertisements in your dreams. 40 sleep researchers have signed an open letter calling on legislators to regulate “targeted dream incubation (TDI),” according to Science Magazine. In it, warned that large corporations such as Coors’ and Burger King were actively attempting to engineer the dreams of potential customers.?

?? Investors Turn to Biotechnology for a Sustainable Future. The next industrial revolution is going to be a bio-revolution. It has to be, given that the byproducts of the original industrial revolution created the major pollution problems we now have to solve. But alongside the fixes, we also need to feed and heal a growing population efficiently and sustainably. ?

?? Tele-Driving Startup to Deploy Remote-Controlled Cars as a Step Towards Full Autonomy. Self-driving cars are taking longer to hit roads than many experts predicted. What if there was some sort of in-between, a workaround to give us a glimpse of a future where empty cars deftly navigate city streets? A Berlin-based startup called Vay has come up with just such a solution, and it is, in short, creative, unexpected—and sort of ingenious.

?? I’m a climate futurist. Here’s what’s next. My work explores how natural and human systems are changing each other, and what those changes mean for us. Every few years I share some key trends I see emerging — ones big enough to alter our lives and fast enough to matter now. So, what’s next?

?? Futurists talk at Sngular (ES) Last week I was honored to attend as a speaker at the Sngular futurists meeting, a space to share reflections and tools on the world of strategic foresight. I shared the stage with some awesome professionals: Ignacio Villoch, Mónica Quintana and ángel Barbero. Here you can find the notes of the event by Héctor Pérez (in English) and the video with the presentations in Spanish.

?? Foresight Forensics: How to to Learn From Your Previous Scenarios. Over the past few years, I’ve been developing a practitioner’s tool I call Foresight Forensics. The idea here is that a foresight writer will examine the remains of an old, dead forecast and try to figure out not just where it was on-target and what it got wrong, but why it got things wrong and what the forecast missed that should have been included.

?? White Paper on States 4.0 (ES) "Exponential innovation trends in the democratic era. Solutions to the problems of the 21st Century". Free book with a series of conversations with experts where new challenges before the XXI Century are presented. Solutions and proposals by Maysoun Douas and María Caso.

?? Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets. I asked Brian Eno for a favour: to write some design principles for our streets projects. I wanted to bring a cultural voice into an urban planning conversation that has become narrowly technical, and continue to diversify the thinking around what streets are about, and what cities are for. Here's how I used them, as part of the #oneminutecities work here, led by Vinnova.

?? The disturbing limits of technology. Research firm Open AI has shut down Project December, a website that gave users tools to create AI chatbots to talk to. What started as a game became a disturbing concern when one man used it to replicate the personality of his late fiancée.

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???Read the newsletter in Spanish