This course on urgent optimism is all about figuring out how you can take action to make your preferred future real. One of the tricky things about changing the future is that sometimes you're working against culture, you have to change people's beliefs or feelings about a certain possibility, a certain technology, or a policy, or direction. You have to make them feel more optimistic or more excited about the future, or you have to change their minds, you have to move them away from a future they're excited about. You have to convince them that their risks are real that there is something dangerous we need to avoid. Because when we build our futures as a society, we're often influenced by stories that are being told in books, in movies, in comics, in games, in our policy conversations, we tell these stories about what the future might be like and that can really influence people's decisions to support a future or to avoid a future. So what we're going to talk about this week are, how do you identify the prevailing images of the future and specifically images that might be relevant to the future you're trying to make? So you can think about maybe what different kinds of stories need to be told or what different kinds of images need to be presented so that you can get people behind your vision for the future. Let's take a look at some iconic or classic images of the future, and then we can talk a little bit more about the role that images of the future play. So an image of the future, it's any cultural or artistic expression of what the future might be like, and one of the most iconic images of the future that often pops into people's minds especially if they grew up in the United States. So if you're not familiar with this, be sure to Google it and you can watch a little video online to get a flavor of it. But one of the most iconic images is a cartoon called The Jetsons, which presented a really optimistic Utopian image of the future in which robots do all our work for us, and we get to zip around the world and flying cars. This is really a vision of a very polished clean technology-driven future where all of our lives would be made easier and more fun by these amazing technological inventions and a vision like this of the future can really help people kind of buy into that belief that new technologies will make our lives better. We don't have to be afraid of them. On the other hand, there is a very popular image of the future that has emerged over the past couple of years, television series called Westworld. Again, if you haven't seen this it's a great one to look for, Google some videos, read a little bit about Westworld. This is an image of the future that imagines very realistic human seeming robots that can interact with us, that we can go into these theme parks, where we can do anything we want with these very human seeming robots fulfill all of our darkest fantasies, and this is definitely more of a dystopian vision of the future where our basis impulses might be brought to bear and where also the robots might rise up and try to kill us. This image of the future really makes people think twice maybe about artificial intelligence and how much we want to embrace it, what will robots living amongst us do to our society, and it speaks to a certain cultural anxiety about these trends. People who really seep in this image of the future might be more cautious about embracing these technologies. We've seen historically lots of books and represent really compelling images of the future. Things like George Orwell's book, 1984, which was really a vision of a certain type of surveillance and propaganda. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which envisioned a world of escapism to avoid the dystopian world that we live in through drugs and other escapist means. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which imagines whatever oppressive society might look like in the future. Today we're seeing a lot of science fiction grappling with images of the future that have to do with broadening our horizons or the species, some of the most popular images of the future in science fiction today are about communicating with aliens and first contact with alien species, the three body problem coming out of China being one of the great examples of it. We often talk about movies as playing an important role in creating images of the future, most famously I think within the future forecasting community, the movie Minority Report is often referred to as the movie that predicted the future because the people who created the special effects for some of the technologies actually founded companies to build the technologies that they simulated for the movie which is another interesting way that images of the future can actually shape the future. Just by creating a realistic and compelling visualization or story about a particular technology, you may inspire somebody who dedicate their career and their resources to making it real. We can see images of the future in political speeches and and social activism, famously in the United States, the I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King Junior, which articulated a vision of the future with less prejudice, less racial bias. That was a particular optimistic image of the future that was used to inspire people to get involved with social change in the United States. In religious documents, we can often see visions and images of the future. For example, visions of apocalypse or ways that things might end, and we can also see in graffiti, people's expressions about how they feel about the future. One of my favorite future images that really blurred the lines between reality and the future was a project called futuresealevel.org, where you could order a spool of blue tape and you could research where the sea level might be in the future if you lived on a coastal community and you can mark it, as though people could actually see 10 years in the future the water level is expected to be here at my knees are here at my waist or here at my chin and actually provoke people to imagine their physical environment changed in the future. What's interesting about all these images of the future is that they can tell us a lot about essentially the beliefs and assumptions and emotions of society. There's a book The Image of the Future that many futurists referred to that was written in the 1960s by Fred Polak. He wrote that, "The rise and fall of images of the future often precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as the society's image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, the culture does not long survive." So he was of the opinion that while we have really positive images of the future, we're actually headed in that direction we're more likely to achieve positive change. When we start having dark apocalyptic images of the feature and telling stories about how the future goes terribly wrong, we're actually headed into a period of decay and decline. This is not necessarily true. This is a hypothesis about images of the future. At the Institute for the Future, we think that you can use both positive images of the future and also more dystopian or apocalyptic images of the future, a future in decline, to create positive change. Sometimes we need to look at what more disturbing images of the future to rally us to make a change today. I'd like to point you as you're thinking about images of the future to one of my favorite images of the future which is from the year 1947, and it was a special issue from the magazine Popular Science where they asked scientists to show off what they thought the biggest breakthroughs in science would be in the coming decades. In this beautiful portrait gallery, that you'll be able to click through the materials for this course to take a look at, and it was really about scientists trying to grapple with the fact that they had just created the atomic bomb which had lead to terrible loss of life and destruction to humanity. What you can see our scientists essentially trying to rethink what their role in society could be to say, "We want to be a force for good. We want to make things that create and build up humanity and not destroy humanity." It's a really beautiful moment to see the purposeful and strategic use of images of the future to try to change direction for a society. So we'll share that link with you. So you can take a look and see. What we're going to do in the next video is we're going to take a look at some of the leading images of the future that are popular today, and talk about the work that they might be doing and how you might get involved in retelling those stories and rethinking those images.
