Future Today #145 - Hype Cycle · Waymo · Generalists · Speculative Design

🚀 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. We are already more than 15,000 people! Do not hesitate to subscribe!

💡 Yes, it took me a while to get back after the summer break but... Here we go again! I'm going to try for a while to post on Fridays. Let me know if that works better for you, see you next week! 🤓

🇪🇸 La edición en español la puedes leer en Substack

👁️ Guidebook for organising Corporate Foresight. How to make strategic foresight your company’s superpower. Grounded in the latest research and co created alongside pioneering companies, this book offers a practical path forward. Through numerous real-world examples, you’ll discover the practices that leading organisations use across various areas of foresight, reassuring you that you can apply this knowledge effectively.

🔮 Policy Fit for the Future. Futures is a systematic exploration of probable, possible and preferable future developments to inform present-day policy, strategy and decisionmaking. It uses multiple plausible scenarios of the future to anticipate and make sense of disruptive change. It is also known as strategic foresight. Futures in policy is first and foremost about translating insights into action: what can the government do now to positively influence long term change and ensure Australians will thrive in a range of possible future worlds.

💡 Gartner 2024 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. The 25 disruptive technologies to watch on the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2024 fall into four key areas: autonomous AI, developer productivity, total experience, and human-centric security and privacy programs. “Generative AI (GenAI) is over the Peak of Inflated Expectations as business focus continues to shift from excitement around foundation models to use cases that drive ROI,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner.

💭 Why Generalists Own the Future. If we think of a generalist as someone with broad, basic competence in a wide variety of domains, then in the age of AI, being a generalist is a risky career move. A language model is going to beat your shallow expertise any day of the week. But I think knowing a little bit about a lot is only a small part of what it means to be a generalist. And that if you look at who generalists are—and at the kind of mindset that drives a person who knows a lot about a little—you’ll come to a very different conclusion: In the age of AI, generalists own the future.

🌱 Enough for All: New Study Reveals Path to Global Prosperity Without Environmental Harm. A groundbreaking study suggests that providing good lives for the entire world’s population is possible while simultaneously reducing environmental impact. The research, published in World Development Perspectives, challenges the notion that massive economic growth is necessary to end global poverty and improve living standards.

Book: The Dawn of Everything (2022) - David Graeber & David Wengrow

TV Series: The Capture (2019 - ) - Ben Chanan

🎬 📚 Do you want to know all the movies and series of Future Today, here is the complete list? And do you want to know all the books, here is the list?

✨ On the Competence of Futures Literacy. This note is an attempt to describe the competence of Futures Literacy more clearly. To help create clarity it uses a well-established structure: competence = knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The note touches on neighboring concepts such as future skills and links to measurement. The core of the note are descriptions of six sub competences of Future Literacy and four competence levels.

🤖 3 Reasons Why Education Urgently Needs Speculative Design. School systems hang in the balance. Education systems around the world are struggling to keep pace with exponential technological growth. In the new age of AI, they stand in a liminal space. Speculative design might just be the answer. Speculative design is a methodology developed by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, that uses design to explore and envision possible futures. It's an approach to imagining alternative future realities and bringing them to life through tangible artefacts, scenarios and experiences.

🌏 UN Strategic Foresight Guide. This is a practical guide meant to support you in your journey of applying foresight. It is informed by the experiences of people across the UN system in making use of foresight. This Guide has three goals: explain the key concepts of strategic foresight and their relevance in the context of the UN’s work; provide an overview of foresight tools and how they might be used so you can decide which tools might be appropriate for you - and when; and show how to frame and design your first foresight initiative or engagement.

⚡️ The Beginning and the End of Foresight. This scenario illustrates a common problem in foresight work: the disconnect between the insights we provide and their practical implementation. If you think of the work of an organization as a huge comprehensive process that goes from foresight (what might be on the horizon?) to strategy (how do we get there?) to tactics and implementation (what's next?), there's a huge gap between foresight and strategy.

🚖 Waymo Robotaxis Are Giving 100,000 Rides a Week. It’ll Soon Be More. After years of overly aggressive forecasts about self-driving cars, here’s a statistic that snuck up on us: People are now hailing 100,000 automated rides a week—a number that’s double the 50,000 weekly rides provided a few months ago. These rides are courtesy of Waymo, the self-driving car project incubated by Google and spun out as its own company under Alphabet. Waymo has been developing and testing its technology on public roads for over a decade.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible - George Santayana

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