Part II — The Future Histories
Chunka Mui
Futurist and Innovation Advisor @ Future Histories Group | Keynote Speaker and Award-winning Author
Winston Churchill famously said, "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.”
In this week's serialization of "A Brief History of a Perfect Future ," coauthored with Paul Carroll and Tim Andrews , we build on that idea.
To create a future we can proudly leave to our kids, we need as many as possible aligned on a shared vision for the challenging transition ahead. One powerful way to do this is by imagining an idealized future, set decades from now. From that future vantage point, we can then craft a “history” that describes how we got there from here. Thus, our name for these narratives: “future histories.”
Future histories are not predictions. Instead, they focus on outcomes we believe are achievable over the next 30 years. We’ll explore questions like: What major problems can the Laws of Zero help us solve within that timeframe? What would it be irrational for society not to achieve in 30 years? How might those outcomes be plausibly realized? These narratives can then guide long-term strategies to achieve those goals.
This overview sets the stage for upcoming chapters, where we delve into specific future histories for electricity, transportation, healthcare, climate, trust, and government services. We won’t cover every area poised for significant change. Instead, we aim to inspire others to use this framework to improve on our work and address other critical issues.
We invite you to read (or listen) and share your thoughts.
PART TWO: THE FUTURE HISTORIES
Overview
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” — Winston Churchill[1]
Churchill was right. History will be kinder to us if we take the time to write it ourselves —especially if we do so?before?it unfolds, not after.
Every desirable (and undesirable) future scenario in this book depends on a host of complex interactions, and realizing our Future Perfect will require getting everyone on the same page for the challenging transition to it. The best way we’ve found for doing this is by imagining an idealized version of a future that’s years out. Then, from that vantage point in the future, we craft a “history” that lays out how we got there from here. Thus, our name for these narratives: “future histories.”
Devices like our future histories show up in many settings as ways of helping people jointly construct a vision and start implementing it. When Amazon begins work with a potential partner, it often starts by jointly producing a mock press release “announcing” a deal. Only when the two sides establish the broad outlines of the desired future do they start negotiating the details and working toward it. Maybe our favorite example reaches back to 1296, when the Catholic church in Italy laid out plans for the glorious Il Duomo in Florence and began construction – without knowing how to build the dome that gives the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore its famous nickname, but confident that the expertise would be there when needed. A competition to design the dome was eventually launched in 1418, by which point understanding of architecture had, in fact, advanced sufficiently, and Brunelleschi completed the magnificent cathedral in 1436.
As we’ve said, future histories aren’t meant to predict the future. Rather, our future histories focus on the outcomes we want to achieve. They can’t be untethered, pie-in-the-sky, wishful thinking. We all want our team to win the Super Bowl every year, but it simply won’t happen. (Yes, we realize there may be a Tom Brady exception.) Instead, our future histories focus on the outcomes we believe are achievable within the allotted time.
We’ll ask: What would it be crazy for society not to have in 30 years? What big problems can the exponentials help us solve in that sort of timeframe? We picked a 30-year timeframe because that’s so far in the future we don’t have to worry (yet) about how to get there. At the same time, 30 years is close enough we can realistically envision what might be technologically possible, with enough foresight and effort — the scientific and technological starting points for much of what can be applied at scale in 30 years already exist today. That vision can then guide estimates of how much progress needs to be made by the halfway point, which, can, in turn, allow for the sort of five- or 10-year plan that’s a common way of informing long-range strategy. Typically, those early investments are small, but you have to take that initial step so you can be ready for the next one and the one after that… and can be prepared to take full advantage when the exponentials kick in 10, 20, or 30 years.
It’s certainly fair to worry about how we can possibly take the huge steps by 2050 that we’ll lay out as goals for the Future Perfect. But allowing those worries to enter the process too early can severely constrain imaginations, and we might end up with incremental strategies that completely miss out on the future. Thinking bigger is almost always better. Kodak, the company that invented digital photography, spent decades taking baby steps toward digital and eventually went bankrupt defending its film and paper-based business. Incrementalism is why the original AT&T, which drove progress in computing, communications, and information for decades, couldn’t make a successful transition from analog, circuit-switched, and wired phones to the world of digital, packet-switched, and networked mobile communications in the 1990s and 2000s and has had an up-and-down record since. Incrementalism is why many of today’s business giants won’t make the transition to our more perfect future of 2050.
But you will!
Future histories aren’t encyclopedic blueprints of a desired future state. As much as we’d love to have a concrete vision of 2050, there are simply too many variables to produce a fully realized projection of the world 30 years out. So, rather than a grand unified field theory of the future, we’re going to sketch out some of the defining features. We’ll illustrate with examples that, while they’re already in use, are so far ahead of the game they may read like science fiction. (In our vignettes dated from 2035 and 2050, we’ll use some names of companies and individuals that you’ll recognize, but, obviously, any “quotes” from those companies and any individuals as well as the actions we describe in the future are figments of our imagination; assume any names you don’t recognize are invented to make for a better story, but any events we describe as having occurred in the present day are real. You’ll have to be a little careful, but we’ve tried hard to reduce confusion.)
Future histories fulfill our human need for narratives, taking abstract capabilities and visions and making them real in ways that let people internalize them and get excited. Future histories help people understand how they can contribute — how they must contribute. People can understand timing issues and see how efforts will build. People can also focus on the threats to their vision that, as a group, they must fend off. These threats may no longer be the saber-toothed tigers that stalked our distant ancestors, but they are still very real obstacles. We hope future histories can unite us as we face the inevitable challenges ahead.
In the next several chapters, as much as possible, we’ll infuse the future histories with systems thinking. In other words, we won’t just describe the technological breakthroughs that are coming but will do our best to show how they’ll play out in much broader systems. For instance, while some proponents of electric vehicles tout the fact that no pollution comes out of tailpipes, our broader systems view will note that the electricity for the batteries largely comes from fossil fuel power plants; that the metals used in batteries and many electronic components are the product of a mining process that causes considerable damage to the environment and comes from countries many other countries would rather not support; and so on.
We’re pleased to see that some industries are already starting to take more of a systems view. Historically, consumer products companies, for instance, have packaged their goods and then left it to consumers to figure out how to dispose of the debris. They’re now realizing — under some pressure — that they need to consider the full life cycle of their products and come up with biodegradable packaging, a recycling process that goes far beyond what is happening today, or something so that we don’t just keep adding landfills or expanding the 80,000-ton Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Nordstrom encourages customers to bring in beauty product packaging for recycling. MAC gives customers a free lipstick in return for a certain number of empties. But industry doesn’t have a great track record on systems thinking. Companies optimize the performance and the cost of their piece of a system while not worrying about the whole.
The effect has been to create what Alan Kay calls “Myopialand” and to push to the future costs that are being incurred today.[2] Energy generation probably provides the best example, as the world has spent the past two centuries-plus producing “cheap” energy from fossil fuels and leaving future generations to deal with the costs of the environmental damage and to find a way to get the planet back on track. Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius figured out 120 years ago how to calculate the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the temperature of the planet and concluded humans were causing global warming, but warming was never assigned an economic cost, even as calculations of the cost have become increasingly precise over the past 60 years, so little was ever done. We’ll try to be as careful as we can about weighing all the costs and all the prospective benefits in our future histories — though we acknowledge that experts in the areas we touch on will be far more precise than we are here and that, even for experts, it can be hard to predict all the interplay among forces in an ecosystem.
We won’t write future histories for all the areas that we think are important and that will see massive change in the Future Perfect — we’d wear ourselves out, and we’d wear you out, too. But we’ll cover several that we believe are key and hope we inspire others to use the model to tackle other critical issues, such as education, food, and shelter.
Like the Apple Knowledge Navigator video that helped produce the iPad some 25 years later, we’ll include factors that should be revolutionary and will package them as neatly as possible. But, like that video, we won’t presume to show all the changes that will ripple out from the breakthroughs. We’ll count on you — and a host of other smart people — to figure out the rest.
Think of this part of the book as Future Perfect: Some Assembly Required.
Sound like a plan? Let’s get started.
"A Brief History of a Perfect Future" — Book Overview in 61 seconds:
Other parts of this serialization
(Subscribe to be notified of upcoming chapters as they are released):
A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the world we can proudly leave our kids by 2050 by Chunka Mui, Paul B. Carroll, and Tim Andrews
领英推荐
Part One: The Laws of Zero
Part Two: The Future Histories
Chapter 8 Electricity
Chapter 9 Transportation
Chapter 10 Health Care
Chapter 11 Climate
Chapter 12 Trust
Chapter 13 Government Services
Coda What is the Future Isn't Perfect?
Part Three: Jumpstarting the Future (Starting Now)
Chapter 14 What Individuals Can Do
Chapter 15 What Companies Can Do
Chapter 16 What Governments Can Do
Prologue: Over to You
Footnotes:
[1] This is a common paraphrase of the sort of thing that Churchill said many times. For instance, toward the end of World War II, a British admiral said the verdict of an operation would depend on who wrote its history, and Churchill replied “he intended to have a hand in that.” [“Churchill: Walking With Destiny,” by Andrew Roberts, Viking, 2018, p. 835] In a debate on foreign affairs in 1948, Churchill suggested all the parties “leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.” [“Churchill,” p. 908]
[2] The intriguing sci-fi novel The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson builds on the idea of an international ministry set up to guard the interests of future generations against excessive climate change. While plenty of chaos ensues, Robinson describes the book as a hopeful “future history.”?
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Former Blast Hole Driller At JSW
2 个月Useful tips
Futurist and Innovation Advisor @ Future Histories Group | Keynote Speaker and Award-winning Author
2 个月FYI, the series begins here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/best-way-predict-future-build-chunka-mui-1bmde/
Researcher in Decarbonization | CBAM | ESG | SDG | Undergraduate in Metallurgical Engineering - Ouro Preto School of Mines | Open to new opportunities and challenges
2 个月Soraia Soares
Artist (Self-employed)
2 个月Awesome ?? Historically… it’s hypnotizing as well. This is awesome ??
Artist (Self-employed)
2 个月I’m listening ???? now. I reposted it over on X Just now. Have a great day and thanks for sharing.