Future Today #047 - Speculative Design, Regenerative, Creative AI

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

✨ The Futures School - What if 2022 was the Year of Free? The Futures School is on a mission to democratize the future, and we declare that 2022 be the Year of Free. We’re granting Free Tuition on all our programs, Free Access to the Natural Foresight® Framework, and Free Inspiration through live talks with global thought leaders. 

🤖 Can AI Teach Us How to Become More Emotionally Intelligent? We believe AI will help humans do better human work, namely by helping us improve our emotional intelligence, soft skills, and interpersonal communication skills.

💭 Why Future-Mindedness Is the Mindset Organizations Need Now. This sense of uncertainty is unsettling and disruptive. For businesses and organizations, the inability to plan and the feeling of helplessness in the face of uncertainty affects their leaders, employees, and customers. It has a tangible impact on how they run their businesses.

🚀 France is relying on science fiction to prepare for the wars of the future (ES) They are a handful of science fiction writers, screenwriters and cartoonists, a veritable commando of creators accustomed to building stories and scenarios of the future and imagining the unimaginable. They are embarked on a mission for the Armed Forces of their country, France: to design conflict scenarios.

🕸 The Relational Work of Systems Change. Sometimes we lose sight of a simple truth about systems: They are made up of people. Despite all of the frameworks and tools at our disposal and all of our learning as a field of practice, purely technical, rational approaches to systems change will not make much of a dent in shifting power or altering our most deeply held beliefs.

💡 Speculative Design and Designed Realities. The word Speculative Design was born in 1999, and I believe its meaning has been changing in the last 20 years. Dunne & Raby no longer proactively use the word Speculative Design and explore “beyond” Speculative Design in the Designed Realities Studio, established at the New School in 2016.

🧬 Scientists Are Sequencing the Genome of Every Complex Species on Earth. The Earth Biogenome Project, a global consortium that aims to sequence the genomes of all complex life on Earth (some 1.8 million described species) in 10 years, is ramping up.

🦾 What Tech Futurists Get Wrong About Human Autonomy. A specter is haunting our technological imaginaries: the specter of autonomy. The problem is that we can’t quite decide from what or for whom. Two movements with transformational aspirations are dominating the tech world today: the first around blockchain and the second around AI. 

🌱 The Regenerative Economy: Reimagined Capitalism for People and Planet. In their 2020-2021 theme of Reimagining Capitalism, Net Impact drew back the curtain to discuss current systems and institutional deficiencies in support of a just and sustainable world.

🧠 Artificial creativity: robots will be the artists of the future (ES) Machines have already entered the professional art sector. Algorithms take on advanced tasks that engage creative workers. What will we humans do when computers can do it all?

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