60 Ways to Think Differently about the Future
By: Andrew Maynard
Tags: Future, Technology, Humanity, Science, Environment

PART 1: A JOURNEY INTO THE PAST

“No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”

— Isaac Asimov

1 Earthrise

“Collectively and individually, we have more control now over how our future unfolds than ever before. But our ability to envision and engineer the future comes with almost unimaginable levels of responsibility.”

2 Origins

“We now know that what we think of as ‘past’ and ‘future’ are merely the byproducts of the laws of physics that emerged after the big bang took place.”

3 Light

“Light reveals a pathway between where we are now and where we’re heading. It enables us to develop new knowledge as it illuminates the world around us.”

4 Movement

“Movement — whether the oscillation of an electron, the passing of a light beam, or the falling of a glass — marks the transition between past and present, and points toward the future.”

5 Time

“We are, at every level, creatures of time, immersed in it, obsessed by it, yet unable to control it.”

6 Entropy

“Entropy is one of those concepts that people often invoke when they try to explain life, the universe, and everything, yet is rarely understood — much to the chagrin of physicists the world over.”

7 Emergence

“We are, in effect, localized anti-entropy machines that have the ability to change the future from its default mode to something entirely different.”

8 Evolution

“DNA turned out to be an incredibly powerful entropy accelerator. Fed by heat, chemical energy, and ionizing radiation, it became the defining base code of increasingly advanced organisms that were ever more adept at making use of the energy around them and discarding it in a slightly less-usable form.”

9 Anticipation

“[Anticipation] is part of a suite of abilities that lay the foundations that enable organisms to not only envision the future, but to plan for it as well.”

10 Instinct

“Instinct relies on the future being similar to the past, and predictable based on what’s happened time and time again. But humans have put a huge wrench in this biological master plan as we’ve developed the ability to change the future faster than any evolutionary process can accommodate.”

11 Causality

“No matter how convoluted and complex the threads tying the past, present, and future become, each past action sends ripples into the future that spark a cascade of sympathetic reactions.”

12 Memory

“If we have no memory of what’s happened in the near past, we have no way of connecting effects we observe to what caused them. And this in turn means that we cannot begin to understand how our actions potentially influence the future.”

13 Learning

“Learning is what begins to carry us beyond instinct and allows us to start intentionally crafting the future.”

14 Intentionality

“Intentionality is the connective tissue between learning and outcomes. It’s the link between observing which levers in the present can be used to nudge the future in different directions, and having the wherewithal to actually pull them.”

15 Intelligence

“[E]ssential as our intelligence is to imagining and building the future, it’s surprisingly hard to pin down precisely what we mean by it.”

16 Knowledge

“When combined with our intelligence, knowledge helps us begin to connect cause with effect, and to create the models and tools that allow us to make use of these connections.”

17 Reason

“Our ability to reason is what helps us imagine the possible outcomes of events and actions, and to focus on the more plausible ones.”