Future Today #003 - Space X, Bill Gates, Protopia, DALL-E

Welcome to Future Today! A newsletter for those curious about social innovation, disruptive technologies and futures studies. In it I will share weekly blog articles, interesting links and recommendations for books, movies, series and courses.

🖌 DALL-E and CLIP take a step into the future of artificial intelligence (ES) OpenAI has used GPT-3 to create two new models that combine natural language processing with image recognition. Thanks to this mix, they are able to identify unseen objects and create images from new text descriptions.

🚀 First entirely-private mission to space station names its crew. Axiom Space, the company that wants to build its own space station, just announced the crew for Ax-1: the world’s first entirely-private mission into orbit. The four-man crew, which will be launched in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, looks a bit different from the typical off-world mission.

🍩 Amsterdam Is Embracing a Radical New Economic Theory to Help Save the Environment. In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” Laid out by British economist Kate Raworth in a 2017 book, the theory argues that 20th century economic thinking is not equipped to deal with the 21st century reality of a planet teetering on the edge of climate breakdown.

🌅 Greening the desert with the sea. The ambition of the Sahara Forest Project is to make the world’s deserts productive again, ultimately restoring vegetation. A team of engineers, architects, biologists, environmentalists and business people have come together to create a concept based on a simple, yet big, idea: Why not make use of proven environmental technologies to produce what we need more of? 

☀️ Bill Gates' plan to stop global warming: block out the Sun (ES) Global warming is one of the most worrying problems facing our planet, but the founder of Microsoft has an idea: he has launched a project to try to slow down the amount of radiation reaching the earth's surface and thereby cool the planet. Or, to put it another way, to try to block out the sun.

☁️ Utopia is a dangerous ideal: we should aim for ‘protopia’. Utopias are idealised visions of a perfect society. Utopianisms are those ideas put into practice. This is where the trouble begins. Thomas More coined the neologism utopia for his 1516 work that launched the modern genre for a good reason. The word means ‘no place’ because when imperfect humans attempt perfectibility – personal, political, economic and social – they fail. Thus, the dark mirror of utopias are dystopias – failed social experiments, repressive political regimes, and overbearing economic systems that result from utopian dreams put into practice.

🔮 Who is Peter Turchin, the Nostradamus of history who predicted ten years ago that 2020 would be atrocious? (ES) It has been a decade since Peter Turchin predicted that 2020 would be an atrocious year. The Russian-born American academic wrote it down in a 2010 article in the journal Nature that today is cited as one of the contemporary peaks of predictive history.

🦠 Narrative Foresight And Covid-19: Successes And Failures In Managing The Pandemic. In this article, taking a text-based discourse approach (Shapiro, 1992), we outline narratives used to manage the COVID-19 pandemic and argue that some have been more and some less helpful for the current and future pandemic preparedness or shift to not only ‘new’ but a ‘better normal’.

🏠 Applied Futurism: Designing Futures. Futurist Nicklas Larsen explores how the future can be used as a source of hope, social innovation, and sustainable development together with pioneers in the field. Q&A with Kaave Pour, CEO of SPACE10, about new solutions that will enable IKEA to live up to its original promise of creating a better everyday life for the many.

🕸 The Notion of Design. Masaki Iwabuchi is a designer who defines himself as a "Vision-Driven Design Researcher", is a professor at Parsons School of Design and organizer of the Speculative Futures Tokyo Chapter. But he is known for his spectacular contributions in design theory creating models that try to explain the complexity of this discipline. The Notion of Design is an extensive Notion page deepening on the concept of design.

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