Episode 105: SÉANCE FROM THE FUTURE

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

EPISODE 105: SÉANCE FROM THE FUTURE

[Be advised: Some quotes in this episode have some spicy language.]

Been reading a couple great books this week about the future by sci-fi writer/thinker Warren Ellis. “Cunning Plans” is a collection of talks he’s given ($1.99), and “Normal” is a series of four eBooks (each also $1.99) that together add up to a novella about a mental institution for people who spend their lives trying to figure out what the future is going to be like (and go crazy from that “gaze into the abyss”).

I’ve always thought “futurism” was some kind of comic book super power – “Look, Mom, I’m so smart, I can see the future!”

(Why does my futurist sound like a nine year old psychic? Also, what super hero first reveals their power to their mother?)

But then three strange things happened which led me to fear

THE FUTURE IS GRIM AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE

First, I was invited to be part of a conversation with people who work in tech and military-related fields, about where things are headed and the place of ethics/spirituality in the midst of it all.

And within moments of the conversation beginning I found myself swimming in terrifying near-realities like “autonomous weapons systems” (aka drone swarms that decide for themselves who/what to destroy; because that couldn’t go horribly wrong); agents of one country planting stories and stirring up foment on social media to destabilize other nations (including our own); and the incredible degree to which we’re all being tracked right now--suffice it to say, if your phone is on there are businesses tracking you and selling that information to advertisers, whether you have a certain app on or not.

And in each case, what we were getting was not “what if this happens” but different industry professionals saying “this is what’s currently happening or about to start happening in my business”.

Then I got to the end of “Normal”, and found it describing ideas almost exactly the same spooky technology that it turns out is not “what if” but about three minutes from yesterday. (Basically, “Normal” is like finding out that your instincts are actually nanobots that were injected into you with your vaccines as a baby.)

And then I discovered that one of my friends from college actually works as a futurist. Chris Kent and I spent two years together as students at Marquette University in Milwaukee working in residence life. Chris was (and is) one of the funniest human beings I know; I highly recommend his twitter account both for his great, wry insights and his occasional stories about his daughter, who will some day rule our universe. #ALLHAILV

Being completely freaked out after “Normal” and my “How the Robot Drones are Going to Destroy Us” conversation, I called Chris to get his take on the future.

Chris, are we all going to die? Is it going to happen soon? And will it be the robots?
We are all going to die. I feel like you should know that from your line of work. (The priesthood section, not the screenwriter section.)

Is it going to happen soon? That’s up to the individual. I just had a check up yesterday and based on that, for me I don’t think so.

Is it going to be the robots? I don’t think so. There are concerns about automated robots taking over jobs and automation’s effect on the workforce. Automation really thrives in low skill, repetitive actions, and those are generally jobs where people don’t have a lot of education to fall back on.

But on the flip side, once the robots take all the low-skilled jobs, by its very nature that will force everyone to level up. If you can no longer get a low-skilled job at McDonalds or driving a cab, then you’re forced to say “I need new skills” and get retrained. You level up to higher-skill jobs, and even if it’s just a step up, it still pays more than what you were getting before because it’s a different skill level.

That’s what lots of economists will tell you, that automation is good both for work and the economy – it brings down costs for employers, but everyone will be working better jobs because the bad jobs will be gone.

(What they don’t talk about is that there’s going to be an ungodly churn for 10-15 years while this gets sorted out. The economists are great at saying in twenty years it’ll be great. And they’ll all acknowledge there’ll be a churn. But none of them will resolve the issues of how to deal with the issues that churn creates.)

But a concerted Terminator-like uprising I’m not worried about, either in the near term or the longer term. I just don’t think that robots’ intelligence even over the next forty years is going to be enough to do that.

My pinned tweet on Twitter is that I’m not going to worry about AI until my spell check works 95% of the time. Microsoft has been churning out Word for 25 years, and yet its spellcheck is still one of the shittiest things in the Word program.

Auto correct is no better. (Pretty sure the iPhone's has gotten worse.)

Okay, so back up and tell me what a futurist does.
Basically, futurism is a method for looking at the signals that you see in the present and trying to make sense of what it means for the future.

There’s a couple flavors or branches – there’s people who are more academic futurists, developing methodologies, processes, practices for thinking about the future. And then there’s what I do, which is applied futurism. We take these methodologies, these tools, practices, tricks, ways of thinking about the future and apply them to problems that clients come to us with. We take a look at the problem clients present to us, and try to help them figure out where these things are going and why they’re going to be like that. What are the forces that are driving change – social change, technological change, economic change, environmental change, political change; why are these forces acting the way they can, and what is that going mean for them.

Our job is to present our clients with a range of probable futures. People often say we predict the future; but we never use the p-word. Because there’s never a singular future. There’s always a series of factors that change and morph over time.

So when we’re looking at the future for our clients, we try to present them with a range of probable futures so that they can make the best decisions that they can.

A simpler answer: I’m a trained medieval and Renaissance historian. Which is not as strange as it sounds. As a trained historian, I was taught how to look at the evidence, the clues, the remnants of what we know about societies of the past, and then based on those clues or evidence to try and create a picture, a narrative, a portrait of who those people were and why they did what they did and how they lived.

Futurism is the same thing, it’s just 180 degrees in the other direction. We take clues, evidence and ideas of today and try and imagine, puzzle out who the societies of the future are going to be. It’s the same skill, just applied in a forward direction instead of a backwards direction.

Ellis talks about “abyss gaze”, the despair that comes upon futurists from too much time staring into the horror of our possible futures.

I really want "abyss gaze" to look like this.

Is this a real thing?
There’s not a lot of horror in futures--at least, that’s not been my experience. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things we look at where the worst case scenario is bad. Nanotech escapes the lab and consumes everything in a matter of days – that’s bad, but it’s not something so horrible it keeps me up at night, because it’s just a possibility. A lot of things are possible, but within that possibility there’s still the question of probability.

In the car today they were talking about a company that has genetically modified some mosquitos to help fight Zika. And if I heard it right, the mosquitos are sterile, so when they mate with Zika-bearing mosquitoes, or the genus of mosquitoes that carry Zika, they won’t reproduce, so eventually the Zika bearing mosquitoes will die out.

And in my mind I could hear people saying, We’re mutating mosquitos! What are we doing?

Is a bad outcome to this possible? Yes. But the probability is very small, and again not something that’s causing me to have some kind of existential dark night.

Even those I know who do military geopolitical futures are not running around saying it’s all terrible doom and gloom.

When you look to the future, what if anything worries you?
I think what worries me from a futurist perspective – and this might be a bit too inside baseball – is that the vision people have of the future is very narrow, and very World One, Western European civilization. I’m worried that there are far more things going on than we’re actually paying attention to.

There’s obviously a ton of things happening in the rest of the world, in India, in Africa that people here aren’t paying attention to, because in a certain way it doesn’t bring them any benefit to think about it immediately. They can ignore them for the time being they don’t think they need to worry about it. But you can’t talk about the future and only talk about Western European-descended futures.

Last year we did this ‘future of work’ project for the Rockefeller Foundation. If you read Fast Company or Forbes, when they talk about the future of work it’s all about knowledge work, white collar office jobs. “Oh, the future of work is going to be co-working collectives and dowloading megafiles at the coffee shop while getting your cappuccino and using your AI assistant to track down the information that you assigned it on your Apple watch while you were on a bike ride, because the future of work is glorious and you can to do it anywhere.”

But that’s a very small segment of work that people on this planet do. Rockefeller wanted to know about work from a broader perspective – how is work changing for everybody, not just for knowledge workers. For instance, what is the impact of automation on countries where automation hasn’t reached yet? There might be whole levels of industrial development that get skipped in these countries, because they go right from having no industrialization to having automated industrialization. And all the benefits of industrialization on your economy – providing jobs, allowing them to create a middle class, that middle class driving other things like the rise of a consume based economy, a service economy – all go away. How is that going to affect already poor and vulnerable populations, or those already being marginalized by society either because of handicap, disability, or other things?

So as a futurist, maybe my worry is a broader meta-worry that we’re not paying attention to a lot of things we should instead of a specific terrifying eventuality.

SO MAYBE THE FUTURE’S GOING TO BE OKAY (FOR NOW)

Thanks, Chris. You put me at ease.

SCREW YOU AMAZON AND YOUR AWFUL COMING CLOUD OF DRONES. WE WILL OVERCOME YOU.

Before I end, I just want to go back to one other great idea on the future, a more hopeful one, from Warren Ellis.

In his talk "How To See the Future", Ellis notes that the crazy thing about people today is that we’ve come to think of the advances of the present as all that different from the past, as though we’re kind of in a dull, static state.

We hold up iPhones and, if we’re relatively conscious of history, we point out that this is an amazing device that contains a live map of the world and the biggest libraries imaginable and that it’s an absolute paradigm shift in personal communication and empowerment.

And then some knob says that it looks like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then someone else says that it doesn’t even look as cool as Captain Kirk’s communicator in the original and then someone else says no but you can buy a case for it to make it look like one and you’re off to the manufactured normalcy races, where nobody wins because everyone goes to fucking sleep.

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror,” Ellis argues, quoting Marshall MacLuhan. “We march backwards into the future.”

But the future is not off in the distant past. It’s right here. "The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communication device that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards."

Seriously, how did we ever think this was the future?

Or this. Even the name, "Tricorder." Steve Jobs would shriek.

The present, Ellis says, is not dull and lackluster. It’s magic. And every day within it, we’re at a “séance for the future”, “summoning it into the present.”

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.

Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.

++ LINKS ++

Here’s the whole of that talk by Warren Ellis. It’s not very long, and so so good.

If you like his idea of how incredible the present is, and how little we recognize it, I highly recommend this comedy routine from Louis C.K, entitled “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy”. Hilarious and devastating.

For those who need to believe in a future where cowboys dance...

And lastly, if you’re having a low day, a little song of hope (which honestly I also got from Ellis!).

It’s really true. Clouds might be thick right now, but eventually, the sun comes out again.

(At least until it explodes.)