The Future Starts Now: Expert Insights into the Future of Business, Technology and Society

Part One

Dark Mirrors

Nothing is real and everything is possible. Life is becoming untethered from reality.

From an economic perspective, value has been decoupled from real-world resources. Wealth is becoming decoupled from scarcity, with massively destabilizing effects. On the one hand, this decoupling of wealth and real-world resources could see us headed for debt, default, overshoot, and economic and environmental collapse. On the other hand, as value and economic growth sever more and more of their ties with physical resources, limits to growth, tied to energy production, pollution costs and scarce minerals, water and land, seem to fall away. As long as we are prepared to suspend our disbelief and believe in the value of intangible assets the same way that we currently believe in the value of tangible assets, we can, perhaps, have our planet (without destroying it) and our economic growth too. In theory, could we transcend our limits to growth if ‘value’ can be created in virtual worlds from virtual currencies without being constrained by reality?

From a socio-political perspective: Facts have become relative, science has become personal, and truth has become optional, rather than absolute. White lies are perpetuated by powerful voices as facts, such as the idea that surveillance is necessary for security – that liberty requires increased state control – or that perpetual war in the Middle East is necessary for ‘peace’ back ‘home’ in the West, or that perpetually increasing disposable consumer culture is the only way to achieve ‘progress’. Such assertions are Orwellian and are designed to make us question our own sanity. It’s the final form of gaslighting, conducted on a scale hitherto undreamt of.

From a cultural perspective: The present has become untethered from the past and the future. This is because, as deepfake technologies improve, they now have the ability to manipulate the past as well as the future. We can no longer be sure that a historical document, photograph, or even video footage has not been manipulated to change history (in ways not even Orwell’s Big Brother could have imagined). Whether historical or modern, every piece of media is increasingly becoming subject to manipulation – allowing for a widespread obfuscation of fact and fiction.

Whether historical or modern, every piece of media is increasingly becoming subject to intricate manipulation – allowing for a widespread obfuscation of fact and fiction. As such, it is not implausible that future generations will question almost every historical fact we take for granted today.

Did the atrocities of the Second World War and the Eastern Bloc communist experiments of the 20th century really play out the way we were taught in school? Did the Rwandan genocide really happen in the happy-go-lucky 1990s? Deepfaked history will allow future humans to question the unquestionable and rewrite our perspective according to the whims of the current ‘thought leaders’ (or thought police, depending on whether they find themselves living in free or totalitarian societies) in real time, and that of course is the difference. We know, of course, that history has always been written and rewritten by the current victors; what is different this time is rather the speed at which history can be edited, erased and weaponized to manipulate the future course of history by sowing miss and disinformation to catalyze social unrest, in real time, undermining the trust upon which any successful society is built.

Already, the only truth, the only real point in time we, as individuals, can be even relatively sure of, is the lived now. The past is a foreign country that erases itself behind us. The future is an unknowable land.

When history becomes as mysterious and fluid as the future, and only the endless, personal, now makes any sense at all, what becomes of society?

What becomes of a civilization completely untethered from time and perspective?

How can a community build a shared future without a shared past?

How can we have clear foresight without hindsight to guide us?

Surely we are doomed to repeat our most miserable mistakes if we cannot remember them?

Of course, all these untethered ideas rely on us believing in them – against the evidence of our senses – in order for them to continue to exist.

How long will our belief in the impossible, yet socially and financially necessary, hold?

And what happens when it fails?

In this section, which we have titled Dark Mirrors, our authors take you on a journey to the (still preventable) dystopias that could await us as we explore the limits to growth and social stability. They look at what could go wrong if we lose touch with what is real and human in favour of the artificial; and what could go right as we attempt to transcend the boundaries of what is physically possible and socially desirable to a more sustainable, more sensible future.

After reading this section, we would encourage you to conduct a ‘Dark Mirror’ audit on your own organization to explore what could go wrong and what you can do now to start putting it right again.

Such an audit involves assessing your business for any and all possible dystopian outcomes in order to identify and course-correct any unintended consequences of your actions that could have long-term negative effect on society, the economy, or the environment. This includes, but is not limited to:

• assessing unsustainable resource consumption and waste disposal practices;

• identifying human rights abuses by supply chain partners;

• identifying if the technology you use or develop could (inadvertently or not) harm any living beings;

• making sure you are not violating privacy or engaging in ethically questionable manipulation tactics such as ‘fake news’ or ‘nudge marketing’.

1

Start with Dystopia

By Nikolas Badminton, global futurist, researcher, speaker and media commentator

Powerful, terrifying and entertaining stories have seeped into popular culture and are now being propagated through mainstream media, blogs, podcasts and social media as being the forewarning of modern society out of control. But, as we find in this chapter, we can start by thinking of dystopia as a starting point for dreaming up and actualizing more positive futures for all.

Futurism itself is born from ideas of dystopia – a twisted world that doesn’t exist but is a symbol of human endeavour gone wrong, or challenged in a way in which we have little or no control.

True dystopias are fantastical and unbelievable – Iceland being ripped apart by seismic and volcanic activity, thus causing total population displacement and the end of the physical land mass; a meteor destroying Washington, DC, and crippling the United States administration and leadership; the sudden death of all livestock globally and the collapse of food supply chains. I could go on. Basically, dystopias are the absolute worst situations we can imagine. They are incredibly useful to explore as they nullify yesterday’s logic and open our minds to completely new and unexpected territories for creating a resilient world.

From Eschatological Beginnings to the Singularity

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the earliest use of the term ‘futurism’ in English as 1842, to refer, in a theological context, to the Christian eschatological tendency of that time (specifically referring to the Book of Revelation, the Book of Ezekiel and the Book of Daniel as future events in a literal, physical, apocalyptic and global context). Death, judgement, and the final destiny of the soul and humankind are central themes and were deployed to incite fear and control.

If we look at the Bible’s apocalyptic prophecy held in the Book of Revelation 21:4, it provides an example of powerful eschatological short storytelling:

And death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more.

The dystopian threat here is that everything is utterly gone. Yet there are positive aspects of this future that are circumscribed by the negative aspects of the present. Its purpose is to strengthen the faith of the members of the churches by giving to them the assurance that deliverance from the evil powers arrayed against them was close at hand.

A more modern and technologically driven idea is that the accelerating rate of scientific progress will lead to a ‘singularity’ – a hypothetical future where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. Human 2.0, upgraded with implanted machinery to enhance intelligence, strength and capability. A future that would profoundly and unpredictably change the course of human history and result in the line being blurred between Homo sapiens and machines.

It’s a blunt tool. As futurists, we need to forgo this ‘open and shut’ approach towards a more foresight-driven exploration of all aspects of the dystopia, and the myriad of associated outcomes.

Dystopian Inspirations: Black Swans and Elephants

As a futurist, I have a penchant for ‘black swans’. I’m not talking about the generally ill-tempered, unwieldy and aloof yet elegant birds, although they share a lot with the metaphorical ‘black swans’ presented by philosopher Nicholas Taleb.

His idea of ‘black swans’ is events that appear seemingly from nowhere and have a surprising effect. Such ‘black swan’ events range from the disruptions caused by the personal computer and the Internet to unexpected terrorist attacks in new jurisdictions, meteorite crashes, and even alien invasions.

When they occur, these events all have major, irreversible impacts – systematic, geopolitical, cultural, psychological, societal, physical – that are often inappropriately rationalized afterwards with the benefit of hindsight and retrospective analysis. When we use strategic foresight to potentially identify future ‘black swans’, we can uncover weaknesses in our systems and frailties in our society and highlight the myriad points of potential failure. It is then that we have the opportunity to galvanize our strategic foresight and planning and identify the full spectrum of risks.

For me, black swans are true dystopia. Not events like the 2020 pandemic (SARS-CoV-2), or ‘The Great Pause’, as some are romantically calling it. The threat of a pandemic similar to this one was not unknown to governments or risk analysts; indeed numerous foresight practitioners predicted the likelihood of such an event. The shock is that it was completely underestimated and any plans were so surface level that every government started from ignorance and denial, then emerged with poorly planned responses. Rather, the 2020 pandemic was a ‘black elephant’ with all the traits of a black swan: global disruption, deaths, and rolling wildly out of control while we scrambled to try and work out what this invisible foe was. Could it be true that it had been waiting to happen for over a century? Well, we had the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that claimed the lives of an estimated 20 to 50 million lives worldwide, the ‘Hong Kong flu’ in the 1960s, and HIV, H1N1, SARS, MERS, Zika and Ebola, which have been staring us in the face over the past three or four decades. We even had Bill Gates deliver a TED Talk in 2015 called ‘The Next Outbreak? We’re not Ready’.¹

The pandemic certainly felt dystopian but even so, I don’t believe it reached the scale that would drive us to make the necessary plans and precautions for future black swan events.

Designing Dystopias

As futurists, we design all kinds of futures so that we can backcast effects and identify their impacts on today. The most potent futures we should recognize are dystopias. Why? Because we have become aware that today’s strategies are failing us as they are obsolete the moment they are established.

World leaders, governments, organizations and associations are always playing catch-up by only looking a few months or a couple of years ahead through the election cycle. In most cases they are trying to keep their heads above water and swim within the Overton window, in which accepted opinion lives within boundaries defined by policy and consensus by the lawmakers and politicians. Too often we are told to operate in a way that is acceptable, agreeable and viable.

With this in mind, we futurists are driven to go beyond those limits and be more creative. Creative with our thinking, our planning and our storytelling, so that we create a habitat to live outside of all of the boxes. It’s then that we can imagine into the realm of turbulence. The modern business philosopher Peter F. Drucker truly identifies the importance of dealing with turbulence, of which dystopia is an enabler:

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday’s logic.

We use many foresight techniques to stare into the vastness of unknown futures – all while breaking the ideas of yesterday’s logic and expectations and reprogramming ourselves to expect the extreme events that are defined by dystopias.

To start defining a dystopian world, I focus on a number of techniques that allow us to quickly and effectively create dystopian futures and provoke clients to create plans to address them. I generally start with the ‘Futures Cone’ model as presented by Joseph Voros (it was adapted from earlier thinking by Charles Taylor in 1990, and subsequently built on thinking by Trevor Hancock and Clement Bezold in 1994: see fig. 1):

Figure 1 Joseph Voros’ Futures Cone²

² The Futures Cone is useful because it allows us to define our ‘now’ and then explore multiple future states. It provides us with a widened perspective that is necessary for predicting black swans. Voros has written and explored its use extensively, and explains its usage, as follows:

In the Cone, time is represented as extending from some starting point at the left – in this case starting at Now, but in many cases it is more helpful to start in the past to capture trends or events that have come before the present – and continuing steadily to some point in the future. The overall futures cone is visualized and conceptualized as having stratified subcones. Across all potential futures the subcones range from the projected future (with the highest likelihood of happening), through probable, plausible, possible, and preposterous futures. An added wrinkle is defining a region of the cone as being preferable from the perspective of an individual, organization, demographic, or nation based on a set of value judgments, and perhaps independent of the degree of possibility involved: an aspirational future.

When using the Futures Cone model I tend to focus on the easy-to-consume ‘possible’, ‘probable’ and ‘preferable’ futures. You’ll likely read about many of those futures within the pages of this book – and they will include both solid thinking and speculation. They may not appear, at first glance, to be inherently dystopian but once we see what more positive futures can be, we can then develop ideas of what ‘preposterous’ futures could exist – both good and bad – and start to identify and amplify negative outcomes in that futures world view.

Personally, I often choose to explore the ‘preposterous’. That means we can see the ‘ridiculous’, ‘impossible’ or ‘never going to happen’ events, and can then immerse our thoughts in a terrible future that might be wrought on us. There’s nothing more alive than a mind, government or organization that is thrust into survival mode. This leads us down one of two paths: panic mode, or a move to mobilize strategic thinking and recognize mitigation plans against foreseen risks. That’s where dystopias start to take shape.

Once we have the beginnings of what our futures could be and have identified the ‘preposterous’, then we can think about applying principles that help with worldbuilding. In our futures work, we should aim to follow humanistic principles for a world filled with positive solutions: humanity before technology; plurality, inclusion and equity; and advancements guided by science and creativity. To further flesh out a dystopian world, we simply invert these and apply dystopian world principles:

PRINCIPLE 1 – Narrow technology leads with prescriptive solutions to create our (singular) future: Off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all technology solutions are deployed in a plug-and-play fashion and the ‘users’ need to conform to that new world. This is often called ‘technological colonization’ as our world is locked into the way that the solution is designed, much like the gauges of railway tracks and the neat social graph boxes presented by