WorldFuture 2012: Futurists Invade Toronto, the Aftermath

INTEL FUTURIST BRIAN DAVID JOHNSON

The future, as we’ve all noticed and someone, surely, has already said, ain’t what it used to be. At least not in the West, that one-time inventor of the notion of progress. Elsewhere around the globe, where hundreds of millions have been raised from abject poverty in the past generation, people may believe that even better days lie ahead, but in the developed world the dominant cultural narrative is that the future will look more like The Hunger Games than The Jetsons. The outliers in this gloom are, of course, the professional futurists, optimists by nature, many of whom will gather in Toronto this weekend (July 27 to 29) for the WorldFuture 2012 Conference, discussing everything from quantum computers to new means of crime prediction (and prevention). And worrying over the prevailing zeitgeist.

Even if none of it works (Smart has no doubt it will though), the expected costs are small and the change he expects in what he calls “our value set” will be worth it. “I foresee a more science-oriented, more reason-dedicated population,” Smart says. “We’ll be able to cut down on all the end-of-life craziness, all the hopeless heroic measures, and be able to think more calmly and sanely.” The result, he hopes, will be a less violence-prone, more sustainability-prone population dedicated to preservation of everything from the environment to disappearing languages and cultures. “Brian preservation,” Smart remarks matter of factly, “is the most powerful social lever I can think of.”

Most people are surprised when they find out how much innovation is happening among people who have a physical disability or a child with a cognitive challenge or who live in poor communities – people Kel Smith, founder of technological-accessibility company Anikto, calls “digital outcasts.”

Companies don’t usually design products for them, but they leverage technology to fit into their own lives. Mr. Smith cites a mother who designed an app that would help her autistic son communicate his desires. She had compiled a binder full of pictures and would point to each one to ask her son if that was what he wanted.

With any change in technology — especially one that can read your emotions — people can get squirmy. Who will have access to my data? What will it be used for?

“Especially as Intel’s futurist I feel an incredible responsibility, realizing that we’re this quite large global company that makes this complex product on a massive scale that’s going to touch the lives of every person on the planet,” he said. “The goal should be to make people’s life better and more efficient. We need to understand and own the fact that there is some anxiety, there is some fear; we need to deal with it, we need to talk about it.”

In his work at Pew, Lee Rainie is constantly asking some of the world’s smartest people questions about the future of our hyperconnected world. Most of the survey responses come back evenly split on the benefits and pitfalls of a high-tech life.

“Big data” is a phrase that is used a lot.

“It’s partly that our social media postings are now out there to be catalogued and captured and understood by Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Tumblr and places like that. We reveal things about ourselves and they can be sort of collected into an interesting dossier on us,” Rainie explained. “And so now lots of people, including advertisers, credit companies and potential employers and folks have vast stores of data available to them that they didn’t a generation ago.”

A Pew report released last week noted that experts believe that the huge amounts of information humans and machines will be producing by 2020 may enhance productivity, “but they worry about ‘humanity’s dashboard’ being in government and corporate hands and they are anxious about people’s ability to analyze it wisely.”

As the well-worn phrase goes, only time will tell.

Unless of course, you’re a futurist.

“Futurist” is a tough title to define. But for Edie Weiner, the keynote speaker on Sunday at the World Future Conference, the core of it all is imagination.

Why focus on the broken institutions and systems already in existence when we could be conjuring totally new ones?

“We could choose to imagine within a renaissance or within a ‘de-naissance.’ In a de-naissance, we take all of our imaginings, and all of our money, and try to fix what was. And that’s what we spend our imagination on,” she told a rapt audience.

“In a renaissance we break through ... we build the things that could be.”