Future Today #084 - Frameworks. Breakthroughs. Chomsky. GovLab

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

?? Do you know that I have published a book? In?“Upgrade: desarrolla tu perfil a prueba de futuro”?(only in spanish for now), together with?Mónica Quintana, we talk about the skills that any professional should develop thinking about the future. You can buy it in any online or physical bookstore or?on the publisher's website.

?? An Overview of Our Best Design Thinking & Strategy Frameworks. Frameworks can be useful tools for approaching design thinking, strategy, and systems design. Here are some of our commonly used frameworks that we practice and teach in our online IDEO U courses. Design Thinking, Strategy Design and Systems Design Frameworks.

?? The challenges of scientific anticipation. The Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator is a radar of scientific breakthroughs offering predictions for five, ten and 25 years. It aims to foresee discoveries so that the political sphere can prepare for them.

?? What the Sustainable Food Future We’re Working Toward Looks Like. When it comes to sustainability and the food system, looking ahead five or ten years and making eventual environmental commitments are not enough. There is a limited time to act if we want to head off the worst of what’s to come, from major supply chain disruptions to even higher levels of agriculture-related carbon emissions. That’s a challenging reality in the face of a climate crisis that can feel overwhelmingly abstract and a business environment that has long prioritized what is happening in the next quarter, not the next decade.

?? Scoping Foresight Work (by Amy Webb). We often hear from company leaders who want the benefits of strategic foresight but don't have a project scope in mind. We developed a system to help prospective clients articulate their desired outcomes, and to help us define and scope the engagement. In my experience, spending extra time on alignment at the beginning of a foresight project -- which can sometimes take several meetings -- is the best way to achieve desired outcomes.

?? What would a city designed by women be like? Cities are supposed to be built for all of us, but they aren't built by all of us. Every city in the world has been designed and built by men. But what if the other half had a go? Barcelona might be able to give us that answer. For the past four years the city has had a female mayor with a profoundly feminist agenda. We spoke to feminists working in urban planning in the city to find out what they think needs to change to make cities better for women.

Recommended film: Swan Song (2021) - Benjamin Cleary??// Recommended book:?Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) - Richard Buckminster Fuller

?? Breakthroughs of the Year. Today, The Atlantic reveals its inaugural 10 Breakthroughs of the Year. The accomplishments span every station of life, from birth to death, and every component, from our cells to the stars. They include a drug that revives the organs of dead animals; an embryo created without sperm or egg; a telescope to see the universe’s first moments; and an AI that conjures award-winning art.

?? Evolution of futures studies. This article discusses the evolution of futures studies. The article starts with an evaluation of the different rival taxonomies and definitions for futures studies, and proceeds to discuss the very concept of paradigm. Are there paradigms in this discipline? If we think there are, what kind of arguments can we use to define those?

?? Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong. If one were to rank a list of civilization's greatest and most elusive intellectual challenges, the problem of "decoding" ourselves—understanding the inner workings of our minds and our brains, and how the architecture of these elements is encoded in our genome—would surely be at the top. Yet the diverse fields that took on this challenge, from philosophy and psychology to computer science and neuroscience, have been fraught with disagreement about the right approach.

?? MIT Innovation Gov LAB. Government leaders are the least trusted among 12 categories of societal leaders. 66% people believe their governments are purposely trying to mislead them. People's trust in democratic governments has steadily declined for the past 20 years.

?? DeepMind’s AlphaCode Conquers Coding, Performing as Well as Humans. It seems preposterous, but DeepMind’s new coding AI just trounced roughly 50 percent of human coders in a highly competitive programming competition. On the surface the tasks sound relatively simple: each coder is presented with a problem in everyday language, and the contestants need to write a program to solve the task as fast as possible—and hopefully, free of errors.

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???Read the newsletter in Spanish