LOOKING AROUND 2035
On Speculation If there’s one certainty, it’s that our ideas and predictions of the future will almost certainly be wrong. If there’s one thing that the hilarious history of predictions has told us, it’s that even the best minds in the field make statements that feel like massive neural misfirings from our vantage point in their future.
In a time where the deep exploration of space is yielding new results on a daily basis, it’s easy to forget that on the 13th of January, 1920, The New York Times famously proclaimed that a Rocket could never leave the Earth’s atmosphere. In our age of discovery and technodeterministic narrative, it’s inconceivable to predict accurately what’s going to hit us next week, let along in the next 25 years. It’s generally wise to avoid using “never” in a sentence concerning the future. The Future will be stranger and more counterintuitive than anything we can hope to imagine today.
Our fascination with Futures and Speculative fiction started off in a strange way, rooted in questions of the deep past. In the urban village of Bandra where we grew up, questions of the future of dwelling and habitat have received the most uninspiring answers. The exquisitely beautiful homes from our collective nostalgia replaced by the worst our current built regime has produced.
In framing our visceral disgust to what was going on, Futures speculation became an ongoing fantasy, and a very real response that lent a dose of daily optimism to our own Bandra Project, an open-ended inquiry into what makes this beautiful suburb tick, and how we could add value to it.
Our Futures inquiries have been defined by a bouquet of failures & a few important resonances.
Our engagement with Speculative Futures has really been guided by a few key beliefs, which are core to the scenarios we’re trying to build. They always begin with hypotheses and end in asking some important questions. The answers to these questions become a life’s work.
The hypotheses
1 The Future is
Optimistic.
While this may seem fairly obvious, it’s easy to see how one’s optimism can get horribly derailed just by picking up a newspaper. We strongly believe it is the responsibility of design professionals, artists and creators of any sort to pull out magical utopias from the darkest of dystopias, and not settle for anything less. As design practitioners, we really don't have the luxury of cynicism, and a strong belief in a brighter future guides our actions in profound ways. How can we create inclusive visions of future cities with space for everyone ? How do the marginalised derive agency in these futures ? How can we achieve a better symbiosis with natural ecologies within our cities?
2 The Future is
A spectrum.
It’s interesting to think that while driverless cars are being tested in Palo Alto, a centuries-old farming tradition is active in large parts of the world, with seeds being broadcast by hardworking hands. The Future is not a singular reality for everyone, much as the present is not the same for everyone on earth. Any incremental step towards a more equitable spectrum is always welcome. Can we look for identities outside of gender? Can we imagine merging age old crafts traditions with emerging paradigms in additive manufacture? Can we build visions of the very new which have space in them for the very old?
3 The Future
is WHIMSICAL.
We’re surrounded by technology based predictions because those are the easy ones to pick off. It’s always going to be bigger or smaller, better or faster, more easy and definitely more efficient. What is interesting to explore is how these tech futures translate into real-life experiences, the glitches and mistakes, the texture of the future. The whimsical future is engaging, fun and all the more important to visualise, so we can design for it. What are the homecoming parties like for your family members who’ve relocated to Mars? What are they carrying in their limited hand baggage allowance for the long journey? What are they eating and what are they complaining about?
4 The Future is
BECOMING.
The future is not some static event that is waiting for us somewhere down the line, but is actively shaped by our steps today. This clue lies in linguistics, its a switch one makes while thinking about futures. The smallest engagements with our own cities play out in nuanced ways creating ripples that eventually manifest in future events. The Future is happening right now, and no action is too small to matter. Can we create platforms for public engagement and realtime response? How can we incentivise citizen actions? How can we find funding for progressive projects to jumpstart their execution?
5 The Future is FLUID.
Our myopic current cultural paradigm consists of the mentality of hoarding, our corporations and citizens believe deeply in a fundamental shortage of resources, resulting in extremely reductive attitudes. Property, money, vote banks and large parts of culture currently have perceived value only when they are forced to reside in someone’s personal fiefdom. Interestingly enough, the future will be defined by flow.
A Dam’s energy is Static, the Turbine derives it’s energy from Flow. The Future profits greatly from the dynamics of fluid exchange, with users extracting value from the distribution flows all around them without stockpiling resources.
The “super distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth”, according to Kevin Kelly. It’s the reason the largest bookstore today has no inventory, and the largest taxi services own no taxis. Our social lives now consist of continuous flows, RSS feeds, Podcasts, YouTube streams, Snapchat stories. We “like” moments by dipping our toes into these continuous currents. How can we apply the grammar of the flow to politics, to community service, to architecture? Can i live everywhere but own nothing? Can i drive the best cars but own none?
Where does that leave us ?
1 The spectre of a.i.
The entire buzz around Artificial intelligence is fun to explore in our own Indian context where most kinds of intelligence seem artificial anyway. As a society heavily invested in the status quo, our collective pushback to this alien entity that threatens to overtake our world as we know it, drive our cars and take our jobs, is playing out in increasingly hilarious ways. It’s not easy to reconcile arguments about driverless cars taking jobs “meant” for humans, but i guess we’d be more comfortable with AI taking over jobs that are unanimously dehumanising. Like clearing out human wastes from our sewer systems. Along with most of the bottom-rung invisible exploitative labour that makes our cities liveable.
The Burj Khalifa, currently the World’s tallest building, produces approximately 15 tons of human excreta and sewage everyday, that has to be shifted daily by truck, since it was designed without a fully workable sewage solution in place. Source : Gizmodo
You’d probably be surprised to hear anyone claim that driving that truck of human crap is a job that our human race has spent millennia evolving towards.
The pushback against AI and it’s related technologies is housed in our own sense of hubris, our deep belief that the human brain is the greatest enabler we know. Current research in neuroscience points to the opposite, the brain is actually a disabler, putting large filters on a world that can be experienced, constantly lying about our experience of reality.
The sooner we accept that we cannot compute answers to every problem posed to humanity, the transition towards accepting AI as part of our lives becomes smoother.
Artificial Intelligence is not a singular entity, as popular films would have us believe, it actually exists in much the same diversity as the human minds that surround us. There will be hive-minds capable of computing through dispersed intelligence. Slow minds with huge memories, fast minds with long term memory loss, and massively distributed minds that are able to predict macro trends in weather, markets and sports.
One of the most exciting minds is the Human-AI symbiotic “assisted� mind, where we augment our own neural capacities with tailor-made AI support systems. There may well be insane and neurotic minds, with dark manifestations for our Future. AI will fill the full spectrum.
As machine intelligence inches closer to mimicking signature human mental faculties, the lines get increasingly blurred. It’s then our challenge to make sure the emerging paradigm serves our future needs well, and pushes us closer to being an enlightened, inclusive civilisation with a pulse on the health of our surroundings.
2 THE FLATTENING OF GENDER.
Like most other things, gender is increasingly becoming a spectrum, and a choice-based identity tag. The idea of looking at gender as a duality is already fast becoming an outdated one, with gender identities and roles continually blurring. Notions of gender then become more about what you “feel” like at a certain point in life, not what you’re “born” as. When gender becomes a matter of choice and preference, how does culture deal with it?
“An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.� Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The obvious response to this flattening out of Gender roles is a certain androgynous outlook to design, style, fashion and larger tracts of consumer culture, where the objects we buy and surround ourselves with will become increasingly about larger narratives and ethics, less about narrow gender-based stereotypes. The rise of ethical options to food, leather-goods and other re-use based fashion brands can be attributed to shifting focus around the gender-driven urge to buy. We may see brands appealing to other human identities, breaking out narrow gender-based silos.
We will see increasing modifications in our work culture, access to information and technology and an equal split of all Future jobs, including the most demanding and hazardous ones. With automation taking over the heavy lifting and mundane work, a much larger portion of future jobs will be tilted towards professions that demand empathy, which will be tougher to teach to future robotic helpers.
Current trends point towards our future selves holding and managing 5-7 jobs each that fulfil different aspirations & contribute meaningfully to the world we will inhabit. The people who work with this paradigm rise to the top of the future job scene, and it seems like a definite step in the right direction. Gender roles may get thrown out completely, with a much greater emphasis on what makes us essentially human, ethical positions and interests, and the establishing of larger affiliations.
3 Citizen participation in urbanity.
It’s no secret that the sheer size and organisation of Governments makes them inherently slow and plodding, with quick responses almost unheard of. In events like disaster management, flash floods, terror attacks and other snap events, local governments have proved to be tremendous failures. As this style of governance becomes increasingly redundant, a highly responsive AI maybe able to control and govern vast tracts of cityscape, such as traffic movement, road repair and maintenance, disaster management and city services. One can easily imagine entire municipal corporations becoming server stacks, responsibly fixing geo-tagged potholes with a quick-setting concrete mix with a line of new drones parked on the terrace. It needs a new model of governance, the hyper-local responsiveness that comes with this kind of intelligence.
BMC Drone Seva, 2035. Fixing Geo-tagged potholes in South Bombay.
As a culture, it puts the tools to fix our cities in our own hands, working with flexible funding models like crowd-sourcing and subscription based finances to be able to spread out expenses and demonstrate proof of concepts before throwing public money away into a highly corrupt human governance system. Hyperlocally relevant solutions are best created by hyper local groups, and the Future will land the tools to build our cities squarely in our hands, to make of our landscape what we see fit.
4 THE END
OF LIES.
We recently pulled out 200 yr old data from the Maharashtra gazettes, covering the history of communal riots in Mumbai, and some amazing trends surfaced. Almost every skirmish, beginning from the first “Bombay Dog Riots�, by the Parsi community protesting about the British governments killing of stray dogs, to the 1992 Bombay riots somehow piggy-backed on the rumour-mongering mechanism. Large rallies and gatherings, fired up by incendiary speeches and accusations of limited accuracy rile up large crowds, and then with the timely help of a few fire starters, results in massive loss of life and property.
Rumours and lies escalate over unregulated social media platforms. A well sculpted lie travels lightning quick, the truth slowly catches up.
In a world with lightning quick AI, a real-time fact checking server hooked up to a hooter that goes off the minute a lie is uttered could revolutionise the political scene. Debates and rallies will then be contested over facts and research, not empty rhetoric and hyperbole. While this debate stage may not supplant the mass rural rallies we are used to seeing, it would definitely pose a challenge to sensible debators. The AI-powered Human debate is a very highly visible format, much like the much-publicised game between Google’s AlphaGO programme that recently defeated Korean maestro Lee Sedol at the ancient Chinese board game Go.
5 Private
Energy
We’re witnessing a huge acceleration towards affordable and accessible clean energy sources, with Solar City’s recent demonstration of Solar roofing tiles and a host of other companies demonstrating enviable efficiencies in the domain of Solar energy harvesting. There are large sources of clean energy available all around us, with the choice of energy depending on geography and topography.
As new age financial models emerge that support clean energy, the technology becomes cheaper, more efficient and more accessible, and integrated quite seamlessly into our lives, with heavily reduced reliance on large energy corporations.
What is really interesting around this is actually the ethics that are inbuilt into this paradigm, where the idea of creating your own energy makes you inherently more conscious of it’s usage. It’s the visceral engagement with the creation process, that makes us more empowered and aware of the benefits. Maker culture has created a generation of problem solvers, and it would be amazing to witness a generation of more ecologically conscious citizens emerging from this paradigm of self-energy generators.
Once a year, I teach a Futures course at the National Institute of Design, India where students are encouraged to create plausible and preferred systems maps of the future, which they then proceed to inhabit with their fresh creative minds.
The ease with which they mix principles of games they’re playing with new advances in drone technology with an age old understanding of heritage architecture and craft is truly amazing to witness. If we’re able to be free-thinkers to meaningfully assimilate the best of what we are given and integrate new technological paradigms as they emerge, we’re off to a great start in dealing with the challenges of the Future.