Future Today #086 - MIT. Speculative Futures. Nomadland. AlphaFold

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.

💡 Happy New Year! I hope you have entered this 2023 with lots of energy and optimism. This is the first newsletter of the year and it comes with some new features, I hope you enjoy them!

🤓 Do you know that I have published a book? In “Upgrade: desarrolla tu perfil a prueba de futuro” (only in spanish for now), together with Mónica Quintana, we talk about the skills that any professional should develop thinking about the future. You can buy it in any online or physical bookstore or on the publisher's website.

✨ The Top MIT SMR Articles of 2022. It’s not surprising that, during the past year, readers sought out articles focused on removing friction from the workplace — from fixing toxic culture to rooting out bad bosses — and dived deeply into topics such as work design, decision-making, and corporate purpose. What follows are 15 of the most widely read MIT SMR articles of 2022.

🌱 Speculative futures for post-development and sustainability using Blockchain technologies. This project aims to provide different speculative scenarios of Web3 and Blockchain, discuss their significant impacts, and make recommendations for public policy toward developing this technology for the region’s welfare. We hope this effort will support readers in creating their strategies for collaboration and engagement toward the pluralistic development of Latin America, with its people, visions, and extensive biodiversity at the center of their considerations.

💭 Welcome to Digital Nomadland. A Portuguese island created a village for remote workers, promising community to the newcomers and prosperity to the locals—then delivered on neither. The Digital Nomad Village is not a physical village, of course. It is a marketing pitch and a virtual infrastructure that facilitates the mutual interaction of international remote workers, superimposed and dependent on the actual, centuries-old village of Ponta do Sol.

👓 VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence. A VR experience called Isness-D is his latest effort. And on four key indicators used in studies of psychedelics, the program showed the same effect as a medium dose of LSD or psilocybin (the main psychoactive component of “magic” mushrooms), according to a recent study in Nature Scientific Reports.

💥 2023 is the year of anti-nihilism. The future was uncertain during Covid, 2022 seemed to be saying, and it’s still uncertain now, and we don’t know how much longer we’re around so why not smoke more, drink more, enjoy the planet before it burns up for good? It’s understandable that it was the year we embraced, on a philosophical level, the freedom of nihilism. 

Recommended series: Tales from the loop (2020) - Nathaniel Halpern  // Recommended book: Moonshot Thinking (2020) - Ivan Bofarull

🤖 AlphaFold Is The Most Important Achievement In AI—Ever. What has AI actually accomplished or enabled that makes a difference in the real world? This summer, DeepMind delivered the strongest answer yet to that question in the decades-long history of AI research: AlphaFold, a software platform that will revolutionize our understanding of biology.

🚀 A Dialogue on Science Fiction. In this series of conversations both Motti and Lombardo highlight their theoretical views regarding futurist thinking and the diverse topics covered in the dialogues. Motti advocates for a “planetary” perspective on possible and preferable futures. Lombardo, advocating for the value of science fiction, highlights the themes of mythology, future consciousness, and wisdom.

🔭 Can We Rebrand The Future? In 1975, New York was a crime-ridden, nearly bankrupt metropolis with garbage piling up on sidewalks. It certainly wasn’t a tourist destination but more akin to the dark dystopian Gotham City that inspired the Batman movies. In a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy, the city turned to President Gerald Ford — who famously told the city to “drop dead”. It was that bad. Now on its own, NYC had to find a way to flip the script and promote a more positive image.

🌳 We can now 3D print as much wood as we want without cutting a single tree. The study authors created customizable wood in their lab from the cells of a flowering plant known as Zinnia elegans, popularly referred to as common zinnia. They claimed their novel approach allowed them to bio-print wooden pieces of any shape and size. This means that if you need a wooden table, you can directly produce a wooden table from the cells.

💬 Organisational Future Sence. In this article, I make the following arguments: 1. Strategic Planning needs to transform. 2. Planning for the future should be anchored by action learning, making it anticipatory action learning. 3. Planning for the future should use the quadruple bottom line approach. 4. Planning for the future should be inclusive of multiple ways of knowing. 5. Planning the future leads to organizational transformation. 6. Leadership is central in effective futures planing.

Asking ChatGPT

🧔🏻 What do you think is humanity's greatest existential risk?

🤖 There are several existential risks that could have a significant impact on humanity, but some of the most prominent include climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and infectious diseases. However, the exact risk will depend on factors such as technological development and humanity's ability to address and mitigate these risks.

🧔🏻 And what should we do to keep us from reaching them?

🤖 To avoid these existential risks, it is important to take steps to mitigate and adapt to them. Some possible actions include:

• Climate change: reducing greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning to clean and sustainable energy sources, and strengthening adaptive capacity by protecting and restoring natural ecosystems.
• Nuclear war: Reduce the global nuclear arsenal through denuclearization and strengthen arms control and security mechanisms to prevent the accidental or intentional use of nuclear weapons.
• Artificial intelligence: Establish ethical standards for the development and use of artificial intelligence and strengthen research in areas such as security and privacy.
• Biotechnology: Establish regulations to ensure the safe and responsible use of emerging biotechnology technologies and strengthen research in areas such as biosafety.
• Infectious diseases: Improve capacity for early detection and response to infectious diseases by strengthening health systems and research into vaccines and treatments.
• It is important to note that action must be global and multisectoral, requiring the commitment and cooperation of governments, businesses, international organizations and civil society to address these challenges.

"You cannot alter reality, but you can alter your attitude toward it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality." - Margaret Atwood

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📌 Read the newsletter in Spanish