Director, UK's National Innovation Centre for Ageing | Ageing Intelligence | Healthy Longevity | AI | Internet of Caring Things | City of Longevity | DEI Champion | Professor | Ted Speaker | Longevity Lab | MetaLab
🏗 Every now and then, I read about these conferences on #longevity, #urban areas and the future. They are almost always accompanied by pictures with futuristic hypothetical city representations, the classic renderings amplified by some fantastic #AI software, like #Midjourney. However, the future is much closer than our AI prompts can imagine. Many innovations are already here among us; it is a matter of being able to identify them to understand which ones make sense, their impact on our lives, and their benefits. And you know what? To understand all this, we can't rely on AI only for an answer. We have to bring these innovations into real life among people. If you don't do that, how could you ever advise companies or policymakers on what is meaningful for the future of their brands or institutions, their customer or the citizens they must serve? We have adapted the concept of #feedforward to our purposes, "images of adaptive future behaviour, hitherto not mastered," which is the way we believe is correct to explore something nobody has a personal, individual experience of: our ageing process. We might have experienced it through family members, friends, or literature. But we don't know how it will be for ourselves in the future. Till we get there. This is what we do at the UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing: we look into the future to see what's there, bring it here before it happens, contextualize it in real life, and involve people in the discussion. 😜 So, let me challenge you. Can you tell the difference between reality and AI in the picture hereunder? 😜 Who has more imagination in picturing robots supporting an ageing population in cities? Us or Midjourney? For example, who said that robots should resemble humans? We have not only bothered to ask the questions, but we have also tested it in several cities to ensure that this question was not the usual exercise in post-it notes stuck on a blackboard. And this is what we do every single day. From cells to cities. #ageingintelligence Voice Italia #cityoflongevity
Dr. Joe Coughlin
4mo
Great thought experiment 🐨 Nicola Palmarini! Imagining and I nventing the future gives us all a chance at achieving the future we want and not accepting the one handed to us.
Healthy Ageing Nutrition expert, PhD researcher | TEDx Speaker | Consultant helping businesses tackle sustainable nutrition | Trustee
4moThe little red robot looks familiar so I am going to guess it's real and on the streets of Newcastle on the bottom left photo! The middle photo with the pair of white robots looks like one I saw in a shop in Japan so maybe that's real too!