Monthly Archives: June 2022

McGonigal: I hit my limit of reading headlines and news stories that described world events like the pandemic and extreme weather as unimaginable. In recent years, weve had so many shocking political events in the United States, and extremism and new kinds of protests and social movements, and this word just kept showing up. It was exasperating because wed predicted so much of this for a long time. It wasn't that they were unimaginable or unthinkable, we just didn't want to think about them because it's stressful and it makes us feel anxious. Or, we didn't have the tools or information to vividly imagine what living through a pandemic would be like or how social media might fuel extremism. I wanted to write a book to help people confidently see that no future is unthinkable because we refuse to think about it, or no future is unimaginable because we don't believe that transformative change is possible.

One of the books driving ideas is urgent optimism. What is urgent optimism and why should we strive for it?

McGonigal: Urgent optimism means we definitely need to act and not sit around and wait for the future to happen. We will take action to shape how the future turns out. The optimism comes from a sense of agency or self-efficacy where the future is shaped by actions that we take today to prepare, plan and change the way the world works. To stay engaged with the future we have to fuel the fires of hope and creativity. We have to feel that the future can be better due to our own actions. At the end of the day, urgent optimism allows for the mental flexibility to internalize a realistic sense of hope that is grounded in an awareness of risks and threats, but engages with new technologies, solutions, and movements that will make things better.

What are some accessible futurist techniques that might translate well to schools or other youth-oriented environments?

McGonigal: There's a simple habit of collecting and sharing what we call signals of change. Anybody can gather signals, and they would definitely work for teachers who want to bring future-thinking into their classrooms. A signal of change could be a news story, a surprising social media post, or something from the world around you. It's something you've never seen before that represents a new way of doing things or a new way of being in reality. You can take a picture of it or take notes about it. It's not a hypothetical idea or fiction: it's a real change happening somewhere.

Every art form has its medium, and signals of change are the raw material of the futurist. Writers use words, computer programmers use code, musicians use musical notes, and artists use paint or clay. We create ideas about the future out of these signals of change. Examples might include a No Drone Zone sign in a park, a pay-what-you-can restaurant in Berkeley that had no prices on the menu, or a story about the new virtual real estate market unfolding in the metaverse. These concrete examples make you stop in your tracks and say, Wow! I guess things can be different. These, to me, are signals of change.

Schools and teachers can create a culture of investigating signals, sharing signals, responding to them, and reflecting on them. Students might discuss whether the signal makes them feel more hopeful or more worried. Does it make them feel powerful? Are they curious to learn how to engage with it? Where will it lead? You can even organize signal scavenger hunts.

Every subject benefits from future-thinking, and it makes learning more relevant because it's about things happening in the world that are cool, interesting, weird, and surprising. My background is in gaming, so I'm always looking for opportunities to generate the positive emotions that we easily get from games, but maybe not from our everyday lives. The surprise, the delight, the curiosity inspired by signals of change are great ways to bring those positive emotions into the classroom.

What are some exciting futures for schools that have emerged from your work?

McGonigal: One of the biggest ideas for driving change in schools that I'm excited to see is the concept of a grand challenge. Instead of traditional subjects or declaring a major in university, students might undertake a challenge to solve a global issue like climate action, ending poverty, gender equality, or zero hunger. Im excited to see how people use the idea of connecting learning at all levels and across disciplines to global grand challenges to create more meaningful learning experiences.

In the book you describe a future-thinking technique where you immerse groups in large-scale scenarios and social simulations, usually set 10 years in the future. How can schools, parents, youth, or community groups run or participate in these scenarios?

McGonigal: The most practical thing to do is take scenarios from the book, those we share publicly at the Institute of the Future, or visit the Urgent Optimists website, which has a club you can join with new scenarios every month. Teachers, parents, community groups, or anybody can adapt scenarios to local lived experience. You play with it, see how people react and what emerges. It could be like a school newspaper or a school play, where kids are eager to roll up their sleeves and be a part of creating something together. It could be a simulation club, a scenario club, or a signals club, but they can be integrated in classrooms as well.

Can you share a powerful or memorable experience that emerged from your work with youth?

McGonigal: We invited teens to a 10-year forecast conference and asked them to imagine a future rite of passage. A lot of teenagers don't get driver's licenses anymore, and it was such a rite of passage for decades. It meant freedom and independence and growing up. Today, teens are less interested in driving for sustainability reasons, economic reasons, or mental health reasons. We asked them what do you think teenagers are going to do as rites of passage in the future? The rite of passage that they came-up with that they all agreed sounded the most plausible was the first time that they would personally experience a climate catastrophe or terrible extreme weather. That was in 2018, before Greta Thunberg came on the scene and really channeled this righteous anger of young people. It was definitely a clue to us that this generation was already experiencing a pre-traumatic experience of climate change. They knew it was something that they would personally live through. The old teenage ritual was about freedom and independence, and this new rite of passage was going to be about coming to terms with loss and trauma. When young people imagine their future, we should believe them. What they're saying is that they feel like there's a lot of trauma and suffering coming, and they need ways to imagine better worlds.

Running a scenario seems to be as much about personal growth and building resilience as it is about predicting the future. What are the benefits of running a scenario or a simulation, even if they might not accurately predict the future?

McGonigal: Future scenarios and simulations are all about how things could be different, so that fundamental creative skill of thinking differently is at the heart of it. It also is a big driver of hope, particularly for young people. Often, its less about preparing for the challenges of the future and more about imagining the world we want to wake up in. Its about being the authors of our own worlds; to use the power of the future as a place where nobody has said no yet.

Learning how to visualize the future more specifically can help people experience less depression and less anxiety. When we're anxious, we tend to fixate on vivid mental images of things that scare us, but we can imagine a future where we deal with things effectively. We can imagine ourselves taking actions that are within our power in order to deal with situations. Or, we can just redirect our imagination towards something that is a better representation of our hopes and values so that we don't get stuck.

In the book you also discuss cultivating empathy for our future selves. Can you tell me more about that?

McGonigal: It stems from research done at UCLA that used neuroimaging to study how we think about our future selves or our far-future selves. Our brain reacts to our future self as if they were a stranger. This explains why we often have a hard time taking action today that benefits our future selves, whether it's saving money for a long term goal, exercising, sustainability choices, or even voting. It even leads to procrastination. We avoid doing tasks and hand them over to our future selves. Future me will be fine writing this paper! But, you're still going to be you when you get there.

We can build a relationship with our future self by vividly imagining future-thinking scenarios and what our life in the future might look like. It's kind of like neurological cross training because it helps us develop what is called hard empathy for our future self, which then can translate into empathy for other strangers or other people we perceive as different from ourselves. Our empathy grows by thinking about differences: how the future could be different, how our future selves could be different, and how other people's experiences of a crisis or change is different. Some people are very motivated by helping others and not helping themselves.

And, finally, this is a nice segway into the empowering concept of learned helpfulness.

McGonigal: By imagining what we might do in a possible future, we can learn our own helpfulness. It is so powerful to imagine how our own unique skills and abilities and strengths, no matter how small, might be of service to others. We often give ourselves more creative latitude when we imagine our future selves. We think, future me can be really powerful and capable and amazing and accomplished. We set higher goals for our future self, and we can more easily see ourselves take action in the future because we're not there yet and our imagination has room to play. We feel the power of our agency when we imagine ourselves doing things that tend to be more ambitious, more audacious. When we envision what we might do to help others in the future, we are empowered to realize we could take that action today and change the future accordingly.

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Harnessing the power of future-forecasting to help invent a better world - MindShift - KQED

In January 2020, when the coronavirus started making headlines around the world, Jane McGonigals inbox was flooded with emails from Silicon Valley execs, government officials, and nonprofit leaders. They all had the same question: Jane, didnt you run a simulation of a respiratory pandemic?

Yes, she had. All the way back in 2010.

McGonigal is a game designer. She builds simulations that help players imagine the unimaginable. And in 2010, she invited nearly 20,000 people to immerse themselves in a future world besieged by a global pandemic. How would you change your habits? she asked. What social interactions would you avoid? Can you work from home?

A decade later, when COVID-19 went from nascent threat to full-blown crisis, McGonigal started hearing from folks who had participated in the simulation. Im not freaking out, one of them said with relief. I already worked through the panic and anxiety when we imagined it 10 years ago.

According to the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, we can all learn to make the shift from panic to poise by training our brains to think about the unthinkable. But what does that training look like? In her new book,Imaginableand on todays episode of The Next Big Idea podcastMcGonigal shares evidence-based techniques you can use to see the future coming. Listen to the full episode below, or read a few key highlights. And follow host Rufus Griscom on LinkedInfor behind-the-scenes looks into the show.

Rufus Griscom:Your path from studying and designing video games to working as a futuristsome would see that as counterintuitive. I think you see this as a logical progression. Why does that sequencing make sense?

Jane McGonigal: What first really fascinated me about the gaming community was this trend that I was observing in gamers: They were developing real skills, real abilities, collective intelligence, and collective imagination that they wanted to apply in a bigger contextmaybe help solve some real-world challenges.

This was back in 2001 when I was starting my PhD work. And I thought, This is amazing! It would be really good for humanity if we could channel these new skills that are coming out of online gaming into real-world problem-solving. But at that time, there were not a lot of games to play that actually connected this community with real-world challenges.

After studying it for six years, writing my dissertation on this topic, I rolled right into, Im going to be the one to make games that help gamers apply those strengths to real-world contexts. And the context that I wound up working in was trying to anticipate hard-to-predict futures, or apply that collective imagination to seeing future scenarios from massively many points of viewthe same way that we see a game worldso that we might discover the outlier risks or unexpected opportunities. And thats what Ive been doing for 15 years now.

This mission to take our interest in gaming and collective imagining exercises and use them to help us better understand possible future outcomesyou and your team have been engaged in this for a while, and you have an astoundingly impressive track record at anticipating possible future outcomes. Can you share some of the details of what you all have done?

2020 was a really strange year to be a future forecaster, in that I had an experience of living through a very difficult future that we had been forecasting for a decade or more. My work at the Institute for the Future involved creating these social simulations way back in 2008, 2010, where we were inviting thousands of people to spend weeks in a private social network. It would look like Twitter, Facebook, or Discord, but everything being posted and shared was about a hypothetical future.

Futurists love to look 10 years ahead because that gives us enough mental distance to think creatively. And if were imagining problems that might not happen for 10 years, it gives us enough time to prepare for them or prevent them. So we were looking at the years 2019 and 2020; and back then, our simulation centered around, How would we survive and adapt to a respiratory pandemic that started in China that was also complicated by cascading crises?One of the things that I specialize in is figuring out how different crises and disruptions intersect. So were not just looking at it from a public health perspective or an epidemiology perspective. We were also thinking about how we would survive and adapt when we have the supply-chain disruptions, when there is misinformation and conspiracy theories about the pandemic being spread on social media, when there are historic wildfires and extreme heat waves due to climate change. And thats just what we lived through in 2020.

What made me sort of crazy for a little while, and made me want to write the bookImaginable, is that there was this incredible proliferation of news stories and headlines using the word unimaginable to describe the pandemic and its consequences. But itwasntunimaginable. We just didnt have a critical mass of people imagining it. We had 20,000 people in one of our simulations, and 8,000 in another. My goal is to have 20millionI think that would really help us prepare for the future.

McGonigal:When we give ourselves these long, luxurious deadlines, we feel time rich. And when we feel time rich, we think, I have all this time! I can do what I want. I can do what matters to me.

When we have urgent deadlines or too many tasks on our to-do list for today, we feel time poor, time deprivedand then we just dont use our time because even though we still have the same amount of time, it feels scarce.

Another thing that researchers have found is that when we imagine 10 years out, we tend to think about things that are more relevant to our most important valuesthe kinds of goals that would help us live a life that we would consider really authentic, really true to our dreams or what we find meaningful and purposeful.

I give people this challenge. Its not, Where would you like to be in 10 years or what would you like to be different? The challenge is to try to vividly imagine waking up on a specific day. So, pick a day of the week; is it a Monday? Is it a Saturday? A Sunday? You imagine yourself waking up, and you try to picture every detail. Where are you? Are you in the same room that you woke up in today, or is it a different room? Where is it? Is there somebody with you? Is it a person? Is it a pet? Is it a different person or pet than you might wake up with today? And then imagine what mood you are in. What mood would you like to wake up in? What would put you in that mood? What might be on your calendar for that day that would put you in that mood?

And then I tell people, Go put it on your calendar. If youve just imagined yourself doing this amazing thing that makes you feel a certain way, go ahead and open up your Google or Apple calendarthey do go 10, 20, 30, 40 years in the futureand put it on your calendar. Even better, invite somebody. Invite a loved one.

It can spark some really interesting conversations about our real hopes and dreams. What is it going to take to get there? Because weve given ourselves 10 years, it allows us to dream bigger and also enjoy that sense of time spaciousness to really make some changes or explore possibilities that we would dismiss as impossible today.

Griscom:Are there any other future scenarios that you think our listeners should consider?

Things to pay attention to: government-mandated internet shutdowns is a huge future force that is spreading globally. If youre not aware of this phenomenon and not potentially prepared to live through weeks or months of the government turning off the internet, thats something to think about.

Another one is climate migration. Weve got to be willing to think about the risks where we live. Are we in a climate-secure, climate-resilient place that will probably be welcoming others who are migrating out of climate-unsafe regions? If so, we should be prepared to see a higher density of living, to be welcoming to people who have been forcibly displaced. Are we emotionally ready for that? Are we economically ready for that? Also think about our pathways to move if we need to. That is something that every serious futurist that I know is thinking aboutpathways of human movement within countries, and across borders. How can we support people economically, socially, mentally, psychologically? How can we make a home? Thats a problem space that warrants so much imagination and innovation and creativity. If I could get all of the smartest minds on the planet to work on something, it would be thinking about movement. That is the biggest future scenario that would benefit from our imagination, and also our innovation.

This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.

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Futurist predicts Covid and what's coming in a decade - Fast Company

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--For the Metaverse to achieve its promise, it requires a base-level blockchain protocol equal to the technical, economic, and philosophical origins of the Metaverse idea itself an open and expansive virtual universe. To fulfill that promise, cryptocurrency pioneer Peter Vessenes and renowned futurist Neal Stephenson are announcing Lamina1, a new Layer-1 blockchain technology designed for the Metaverse with Web3 principles in mind.

Co-founders Vessenes and Stephenson serve as Lamina1s chief executive officer and chairman, respectively. Later this year, the company will launch a testnet and a subsequent betanet. Beyond 2022, the co-founders plan to seed a new immersive environment inspired by Stephenson's million-selling novel Snow Crash, building infrastructure and releasing tools to support the work of third-party creators who want to build Open Metaverse experiences at scale.

Lessons Learned from Web 2.0

As titans of the technology industry implement their vision of the Metaverse - a sector projected to grow to $1T in the coming decade - Lamina1 is working to ensure it does not repeat the missteps of the past by continuing to perpetuate existing structures of centralized ownership and inequality.

Lamina1 proposes an alternative a more modern and integrated Web3 community and ecosystem as the first building block for a truly Open Metaverse. The provably carbon negative Lamina1 chain will offer high transaction volume and an economic design with new incentive mechanisms to help create thriving, vibrant economies for creators and entrepreneurs.

Lamina1 Co-founders Bridge Visionary Science Fiction to Imminent Metaverse Reality

The concept of the Metaverse, an immersive version of the internet was first brought to life in 1992 with the publication of Snow Crash. Now, 30 years later, Stephenson is for the first time founding a company to create the digital world he envisioned.

The 30th anniversary of Snow Crash, and recent interest in actually building the Metaverse, has got me thinking about how to do it in a way thats true to the original concept, said Stephenson. That means creative ferment rooted in a strong base layer of open source tech that provides key services to creators while making sure that they get paid. The purpose of Lamina1 is to provide that, using the best and most up-to-date ideas from the industry. Well build first-and second-party experiences just to make sure it all works. But well know weve succeeded when Lamina1 is adopted by third-party creators.

This vision will be brought to life by the considerable engineering and business acumen of Lamina1s co-founder, Peter Vessenes. Vessenes is known in the cryptocurrency industry for a series of firsts, namely launching the first VC-backed Bitcoin company (2011) and forming the Bitcoin Foundation (2012) - today a blueprint for the way the now $1T+ blockchain industry engages communities and manages and creates cryptocurrencies.

Lamina1s Founding Team Brings Together Experts in Virtual Worlds

Joining the Lamina1 team is Metaverse pioneer Tony Parisi, former head of AR/VR at Unity. He was also an early leader in Web3D and virtual reality, the inventor of VRML (the original standard for 3D graphics on the web) and co-creator of glTF, the open file format that today powers millions of 3D objects. Rounding out the Lamina1 leadership team is advisor Rony Abovitz, founder of Sun and Thunder, Magic Leap, and MAKO Surgical.

I am incredibly excited about Lamina1, said Abovitz. When Neal and Peter told me what they wanted to do (and if I would join their quest), it felt right and good. Neal brings wisdom, empathy, creativity, and a moral framework to his work- attributes deeply needed in creating a good future and a Metaverse that works for humanity. There is no one better to lead the way to build a more Open Metaverse. It is also the right time in human history for there to be a connection between the decentralized open innovations we see in the crypto world and Neal's innate vision and deep insights. I also loved the meshing of Peters genius in crypto with Neals visionary imagination.

I dont know how to describe this other than a true meeting of the minds, said Vessenes. "As an active investor and cryptographer, I have a list of the technology, economic and social innovations I'd like to see in a Layer-1 chain, so being able to team up with Neal and his personality, wisdom, and vision was compelling enough that it brought me out of retirement, so to speak. Seeing some of the earliest Bitcoin and Ethereum investors in the world back the project personally feels like a super special moment for all of us. I can think of no better way to honor Snow Crash's 30th anniversary than by co-founding Lamina1 with Neal.

Initial Investors in Lamina1 include Rony Abovitz, Geoff Entress, Jeremy Giffon, Bing Gordon, James Haft, Reid Hoffman, David Johnston, Joseph Lubin, Patrick Murck, Matthew Roszak, Tihan Seale, Peter Vessenes and Wu Ying.

Lamina1 will be formally introduced at Consensus 2022 presented by CoinDesk. For more information, visit lamina1.com.

About Lamina1

The brainchild of Neal Stephenson (Chairman), who first conceptualized the Metaverse in his 1992 million-selling book Snow Crash, and Peter Vessenes (CEO), a foundational leader from the early days of Bitcoin, Lamina1 is a Layer-1 blockchain purpose-built to empower the Open Metaverse. Lamina1s chain technology, cryptographic model and extensive intellectual property partnerships (to be announced throughout 2022) will establish it as the preferred destination for this generations most creative minds those who are crafting the digital societies of the future. It is the first provably carbon-negative blockchain in the world.

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Visionary Futurist Neal Stephenson and Crypto Pioneer Peter Vessenes Announce Lamina1, the Layer-1 Blockchain for the Open Metaverse - Business Wire

AnimationHistoryIllustration #anime#architecture#drawing#film#science fiction

Akira, cut #1, Final production background detail, Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 93 x 53 centimeters. All photos from AKIRA (Movie), based on the graphic novel AKIRA by Katsuhiro Otomo. First published by Young Magazine, Kodansha Ltd. MASH ROOM / AKIRA COMMITTEE, shared with permission

Katsuhiro Otomos 1988 sci-fi classic Akira has had an unparalleled influence on anime and film, and an exhibition at the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin showcases the original drawings that brought its futuristic cyberpunk setting to life. Akira The Architecture of Neo Tokyo features 59 production backdrops, layouts, concepts, and image boards, many of which have never been shown publicly. The collection includes now-iconic works by art director Toshiharu Mizutani and collaborators Katsufumi Hariu, Norihiro Hiraki, Shinji Kimura, Satoshi Kuroda, Hiromasa Ogura, Hiroshi no, Hajime Soga, Tsutomu Uchida, and Takashi Watabe.

Otomo first released the dystopian story as a manga series in 1982 before turning it into the highly influential action film a few years later. The narrative follows characters Shtar Kaneda, the telekinetic Tetsuo Shim, and their friends, who navigate the imagined Japanese metropolis of Neo Tokyo with its neon streetlights, crumbling infrastructure, and unrelenting post-apocalyptic vibe.

Ahead of the exhibition, curator Stefan Riekeles also released the book Anime Architecture: Imagined Worlds and Endless Megacities. The volume contains fantastic scenes from various animated classics including Ghost in the Shell and Metropolis. You can see Akira The Architecture of Neo Tokyo through September 4, and according to Its Nice That, the show might travel to London next.

Akira, pattern no. 182, final production background, Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 55 x 42 centimeters

Akira, pattern no. 2211, final production background, Hiroshi Ohno, poster color on paper, 50 x 36 centimeters

Akira, pattern no. 2204, picture board, Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 25 x 35 centimeters

Akira, pattern no. 700, final production background Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 26 x 37 centimeters

Akira, pattern no. 214, final production background, Toshiharu Mizutani, poster color on paper, 25.5 x 37 centimeters

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Join now!

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An Exhibition Unearths Rare Production Drawings from the Futuristic Neo Tokyo of the Anime Classic 'Akira' - Colossal

Teslas futuristic diner with drive-in theater and Supercharger station is finally becoming a reality, and we get a look at what could look like thanks to renders based on the construction plans.

This project has been in the work for a long time.

In 2018,Elon Musk said that Tesla plans to openan old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in Los Angeles. It was yet another, Is he joking? kind of Elon Musk idea, but he apparently wasnt kidding.

A few months later,Tesla actually applied for building permits for a restaurant and Supercharger station at a location in Santa Monica. However, the project has since stalled, apparently due to local regulations. Nevertheless, Tesla still moved forward with a Supercharger at the location, but it had to move the diner project to Hollywood earlier this year.

Last month, Tesla filed the construction plans with the city giving us the first look at what the automaker intends to build.

We learned from the plans that it will be a semi-circular two-story diner with 29 Supercharger stalls and two movie theater screens, but everything is from architectural plans.

Ed Howard, an expert in architectural models, built renders based on those plans to give us a better idea of what the Tesla diner could look like:

Obviously he took some liberties for things that werent in the plans, like the name of the diner, Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

But for the most part, thats what the building and layout should look like:

It looks like the right mix of retro-looking, which was the original plan, and a more futuristic design, which was the new plan once it got moved to Hollywood. The renders are accurate down to the bamboo walls that are going to separate the Tesla diners lot from the rest of the block.

We dont have a solid timeline on when Tesla plans to open the diner, and it is going to be dependent on permit approvals, but things are moving forward.

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Heres what Teslas futuristic diner with drive-in theater and Supercharger could look like - Electrek