Why Public Intellectuals Promote an Overly Simplistic Future ⊗ How to Prepare for a GenAI Future You Can’t Predict ⊗ Empire of Dust: What the Tiniest Specks Reveal About the World

Also this week → How one building changed filmmaking ⊗ Femmetopia ⊗ Cybernetic Forests ⊗ Solarpunk is going mainstream

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Why public intellectuals promote an overly simplistic future

Great article from Alex Fergnani for Farsight, where he argues that public intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari, Sam Harris, Slavoj Zizek, that Canadian ‘academic’ I won’t name, and a bunch of others he gives examples for, often fail to communicate the multiplicity and complexities of the future(s) to the public. They tend to promote a specific image of the future, discounting others, which can be overly singular, simplistic, and emotionally loaded. They often lean towards a specific image of the future and relentlessly promote this one image while discounting others.

Fergnani believes that to responsibly inform the public about the future of any topic, it is necessary to impartially present more than one image of the future, starting with at least a primarily positive one and a primarily negative one. He paints the issue as largely a question of lack of knowledge/training in foresight for these public figures, I wish he’d also leaned a bit more in the fact that these visions are often self-serving, a form of marketing, and what media are looking for.

In last week’s headline piece, Frank Spencer was pushing for more transformational futuring and asking us to lean into “foresight’s challenging nature” instead of simply being used as “a supplement that reinforces existing planning, data management, or org dev practices” (from his comment on my LinkedIn post). Here Fergnani is asking for public intellectuals to not stick to one position, diversify the futures they share, and be more impartial. Their articles are not opposed as such, but taken together they paint a complex picture of how today’s challenges require the toolset of foresight, to go beyond ‘default’ futures, but they also point to a hard to find balance between method, multiple visions, the need for societal change, and individual opinions. I’m looking forward to thinking more on this and seeing how this balance evolves and resolves for various people.

By instead stressing the existence of numerous scenarios, each of which can be affected by our agency to change it, public intellectuals would also convey a more subtle but equally important message, i.e., that reality is more complex than what both utopian and dystopian images would lead us to believe. Indeed, any future that is desirable for some stakeholders may inevitably be undesirable for others. […]

An additional reason why public intellectuals focus so vehemently on a specific and often polarised image of the future, on the top of their emotional appraisal, is that they sometimes overestimate the impact of current trends and events on the future. […]

In sum, public intellectuals should impartially discuss multiple images of the future to teach the public that the future is not predetermined. They should also meticulously examine the visions of the future they present, taking into account the emotional load they carry, in order to steer clear of fearmongering or excessive idealisation. Additionally, it is crucial for them to ensure that these visions are not influenced by fleeting trends and immediate events.

How to prepare for a GenAI future you can’t predict

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Amy Webb provides what I find to be a very informative and actionable (not a fan of the word but…) view on AI in business and how to approach it over the coming years. Webb finds that “leaders are focused too narrowly on immediate gains, rather than how their value network will transform in the future.”

According to her recent experience, executives across industries are concerned about how to create more value with fewer human resources, but they should temper their expectations about what generative AI can do for their business. Leaders shouldn’t focus simply on reducing operational costs, but rather on top-line growth, while workers will need to understand how to delegate tasks to AI and learn how to leverage multimodal AI to do more and better work.

Webb finishes the piece by proposing the four step IDEA framework; identify, determine, extrapolate, and anticipate. “Used regularly, this framework enables leaders to see the landscape more clearly, evaluate gaps within their organizations, and link emerging technology to existing strategy, positioning them to make decisions with confidence.” Although presented here in the context of AI, it’s actually a good approach to connect foresight of any topic to strategy.

It isn’t enough for an AI system to perform a task; the output has to be proven trustworthy, integrated into existing workstreams, and managed for compliance, risk, and regulatory issues. […]

The key to making productive use of multimodal AIs is understanding how and what to delegate to a machine, so that both the human and the AI can accomplish more through collaboration than by working independently. However delegation is something professionals routinely struggle with: They either assign too much, or not enough, or not the right tasks. Working alongside a multimodal AI will require workers to master the art of delegation. […]

Resist the temptation to reduce your workforce — and instead use strategic foresight to create a future where AI is leveraged by a highly skilled workforce, and where human–AI teams are more productive, creative, and efficient working together than apart.

Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world

One of the joys of blogs and newsletters is that you can find smart people and follow their progress, how their thinking evolve, how they discover, explore, and even unearth topics. I’ve been reading Jay Owens for years and it’s been a pleasure to follow her writings on the topic of dust (yes dust), which has now been turned into a book.

In this edited extract from Dust: The Modern World In a Trillion Particles, Jay explains what she means by ‘dust,’ shows some of the major sources, their impact on our health, and then takes us through some of the history of these tiny particles, from soot on 10 Downing street, to gender roles in the 50s and 60s, and microplastics today.

The pollution is now polychrome: the primary residue adhering to buildings is not the black of carbon soot, but a warmer browny-yellow colour from the organic hydrocarbons in petrol and diesel fuel. As sulphate emissions from traffic fall, buildings may yet turn green as mosses and lichens grow back. […]

When I’m stressed or overwhelmed, or when I feel a lack of control in my life, I feel a compulsive need to clean my flat. It’s a desire to restore order to my environment, in the hope that it might somehow restore such order to my agitated mind. The same belief exists at a societal level. […]

Dust is simultaneously a symbol of time, decay and death – and also the residue of life. Its meaning is never black or white, but grey and somewhat fuzzy. Living with dust – as we must – is a slow lesson in embracing contradiction: to clean, but not identify with cleanliness; to respect the material need for hygiene while distrusting it profoundly as a social metaphor.

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How one building changed filmmaking → Scenius klaxon! Mega Youtuber Casey Neistat, Greta ‘Barbie movie’ Gerwig, Lena Dunham, and many of NYC’s most successful filmmakers all worked at one point from “The Diane Fink School of Filmmaking” at 368 Broadway in NYC, where they innovated, collaborated, and perfected their craft.

Asides

• 😭 🇸🇪 Nooooo!! Ikea-backed SPACE10 is closing down. Have a look at Ten years of ground-breaking design ideas at Wallpaper and some history on their own site.
• 😍 🐙 🇺🇸 Thousands of Octopuses Gather at This Mysterious Spot. Now, We Know Why.. “The "Octopus Garden" is the location of the largest gathering of octopuses anywhere on Earth, and new research has an explanation.”
• 👏🏼 🌳 🛢️ 🇪🇨 The people of Ecuador just made climate justice history. The world can follow. “Ecuador’s state oil company, Petroecuador, had been producing nearly 60,000 barrels a day in the Yasuní. It now must figure out how to dismantle its entire operation and go home. When in history has a popular vote ever forced an oil company to cease active drilling? Never.”
• 🤩 🧽 🎥 🇨🇳 The genius of China’s sponge cities. “China has ambitious plans to build 30 sponge cities, each customized to its region, in the hopes that 80% of its urban areas will be able to absorb and reuse at least 70% of rainwater by 2030.”
• 😍 🖼️ 🇯🇵 Elaborately Detailed Illustrations of Japanese Hotel Rooms by Kei Endo Highlight Architecture and Ornament. “Carefully measured, the interior diagrams depict the furnishings, amenities, and layouts of various rooms, from corner suites to intimate sleeping pods. Endo elaborates on style elements like creative wall decor or unique views, including dimensions for every aspect of the room, right down to the height of the wine glasses.”
• 🤔 🤔 ☢️ 🚀 🇺🇸 NASA’s Nuclear Rocket Could Shorten Trip to Mars to 45 Days. “NASA has hired Lockheed Martin to design, build, and test a nuclear-powered rocket for space travel. The technology could speed up a manned trip to Mars from the current seven-month minimum to as few as 45 days. A nuclear fission reactor would power the rocket’s engine for nuclear propulsion.”
• Next Generation of Landscape Architecture Leaders Focus on Climate, Equity, and Technology. “Sanders highlighted the results of a five-year assessment of the LAF fellowship program and its efforts to grow the next generation of diverse landscape architecture leaders. The assessment shows that past fellows are shaping the future of the built environment in key public, non-profit, and private sector roles.”