Futurist Explains Why Dystopia Is Not Inevitable | Pivot

Kara Swisher and guest host Lydia Polgreen talk to futurist Ari Wallach about his new PBS series "A Brief History of the Future." Wallach explains how he's approaching the future with optimism, instead of doom and gloom, and why we need to move away from short-term thinking. #pivot #podcast #future

Kara SwisherhostAri WallachguestLydia Polgreenhost

Apr 2, 202416mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

35 min read · 7,064 words

0:00 – 1:00
What futurists actually do: megatrends, scenarios, and probability
1. KSKara Swisher
  Ari Wallach is a futurist and the host of the new PBS series, A Brief History of the Future. The show examines the ways people are problem-solving and working to improve the world for the next generations. I welcome it. I wish I was a fut- futurist. So, Ari, explain what a futurist is.
2. AWAri Wallach
  So, you know, there... Look, there, there's two different ways of thinking about what a future is. There's a way that people think about it in the kind of common way, which is we have a crystal ball and we go into a room, or we go onto a stage and we tell s- and we predict, "This is what tomorrow is gonna be." The reality is, it's a, it's a much more structured endeavor. So, a lot of what we do is we look at mega trends. We look at things that have been happening for, for, for several years, oftentime decades, and then we start to extrapolate what those would be like moving forward the next five, 10, 15, 20 years. And then within that, we build scenarios or stories about what might happen. Not best case, not worst case, but probabilistically, what is likely to occur given these mega trends? So that, that's what kind of professional futurists do.
1:00 – 1:57
Why he’s pushing back on dystopia: CEOs, teens, and cultural pessimism
1. KSKara Swisher
  So, in this series, you're really offering a positive view of the future. There's so much dis- you know, especially in science fiction and elsewhere, you're trying to move away from doom and gloom and dystopia. Um, why did you feel it was important to explore? And I'll just make a note here. It's one of the things I've been trying to do a lot more lately about where the good parts are, especially around AI, and we'll get into that, and Lydia will have some questions. Um, but as you say in the show, um, we're currently at a sort of inflection point to decide our fate around the, th- especially in the environment, but also AI and all kinds of things. Talk a little bit about why you did the positive spin and what the inflection point is.
2. AWAri Wallach
  Look, it... Look, for, for 20 years, I, I've been a futurist, and I've been going into rooms and what more- w- what happens more often than not is CEOs or government leaders will s- will say the same thing. "What's the worst thing that's gonna happen and how do we position ourselves not to be part of the worst thing?" It's not how do we position ourselves-
3. KSKara Swisher
  Right.
4. AWAri Wallach
  ... not to contribute to it, but how do we avoid it. Um, and so-
1:57 – 3:15
“If you can’t see it, you can’t be it”: the need for better future stories
1. KSKara Swisher
  Right.
2. AWAri Wallach
  ... it occurred to me, I have, I have 15-year-old twin daughters, and when I look at their bookcase in their room for young adult fiction, every single book that takes place in the future is dystopian. And then when we look at youth today, where depending on which poll you look at, anywhere from 70 to 80% say they, they have kind of dread towards the future. I think back about when I was their age, uh, i- in the '90s, and I was optimistic about the future. Now, obviously there were very different trends happening at the time, but net-net, and this goes back to sports psychology, you know, (laughs) i- if- if you can't see it, you can't be it. And if all we're showing is doom and gloom, and this is not to take away from the doom and gloom of the current moment, that is what we are going to head towards, right? W- if we look back at the last time there were good stories about tomorrow that took place not in a perfect future, but in a better future, we have to go back to the mid-1960s, to Star Trek, right? There was a first interracial kiss on Star Trek decades before we actually saw it anywhere else on TV. Um-
3. KSKara Swisher
  I love it.
4. AWAri Wallach
  ... that hasn't happened for quite some time.
5. KSKara Swisher
  So, people who don't know, that was Uhura and Shatner, I believe, but go ahead.
6. AWAri Wallach
  It, it, I, I-
7. KSKara Swisher
  Go ahead.
8. AWAri Wallach
  ... was gonna say that, but I realized I'm, I'm in the company that someone can n- name drop. So, it was them. And so-
9. KSKara Swisher
  Yeah.
3:15 – 3:45
From helping clients “win” to a shared human future project
1. AWAri Wallach
  ... look, my... The responsibility of a futurist isn't just to kind of help your clients win the future, right? I mean, it... Look, I don't begrudge folks who do that. I decided-
2. KSKara Swisher
  Mm-hmm.
3. AWAri Wallach
  ... several years ago that that's not gonna be the way that I'm gonna do it anymore. For me, it's no longer, you know, client A wins and client B loses. For, for me now, I, I view this as much, as a much kind of larger homo sapien project. We either all win or we all kind of lose, and we have to enter it into that way.
4. KSKara Swisher
  All right. Lydia?
3:45 – 4:52
Hope under pressure: lessons from conflict zones and the Global South
1. LPLydia Polgreen
  I mean, it's, it's really fascinating. And I, I come at this, uh... I mean, Ari, your, your work is so interesting and I come at this, um, from having been a, a foreign correspondent. Um, and I remember I wrote a, I wrote a, um, a, a piece, uh, you know, many years ago, eh, when I was covering the crisis in Darfur, which is, you know, the region of Sudan. There was a, you know, ethnic cleansing and all these horrible things were happening. And a- a thing that I noticed was just that, like, the, the, the, the, the... Every interview that I'd do with someone who was, like, living in a straw hut, you know, having been chased from their home was like, "I... Here's my baby and I'm hopeful for my baby's future." You know? Um, and, and, like, uh, so I did some research about this and I found that, like, there was actually, like, you know, uh, that Africa was actually the most optimistic continent on the Earth. Um, the, the Gallup polling showed that. So, I mean, one of the things that I think is really fascinating about the work that you're doing and this series is, like, you really went all around the world and talked to lots of different kinds of people. And the... It's often the people that you think have the least reason to be optimistic who have, um, the most hope for, like, what the future could hold. Um, and, and I'm curious, like, what, what, what did your, what did your sort of reporting and research show about that?
4:52 – 5:35
The mindset shift: treating the future as a verb you help make
1. AWAri Wallach
  Well, it's interesting. So, the way I kind of... I, I mentioned several years ago, I decided to make the switch into a kind of more protopian or optimistic futuring. Not, not Pollyannaish, but protopian.
2. KSKara Swisher
  Protopian.
3. AWAri Wallach
  We'll get to that, we'll get to that in a second.
4. KSKara Swisher
  (laughs)
5. AWAri Wallach
  Uh, where that came from was-
6. KSKara Swisher
  Okay. (laughs)
7. AWAri Wallach
  ... I was doing work for the UN Refugee Agency and we were in the Horn of Africa. And to your point, Lydia, more often than not, those were the most optimistic folks about the future, the people that were literally on the run for their lives. Um, whereas people in the global north or in America were the most dystopian, the most doom and gloom. And we can get into that in a second. But that's... What I found as I traveled the world were people who could look at the future... Eh, I don't wanna be binary about it, but either, again, looking at
5:35 – 6:40
Energy independence and “futures we want to live in”: the Morocco solar example
1. AWAri Wallach
  it as a place, that it was this noun that they were hurtling towards, or they looked at the future as a verb. It's a thing that they were making and that they were actually a participant in. It varied where I went in the world, but in... Generally that mindset was the key differentiator between folks and how they thought about tomorrow. And that's what I found. W- w- you know, it, it was in Morocco, four hours through the Atlas Mountains, that I met with someone who was running one of the largest concentrated solar power plants in the world. And he said, "We're gonna be energy independent and eventually w-"... much like Buckminster Fuller talked about decades ago, we will link with other energy grids around the world. You don't hear that talk in America. You hear about the grid failing-
2. KSKara Swisher
  No.
3. AWAri Wallach
  ... there you hear about futures that we wanna live in as opposed to futures that we wanna run from.
4. KSKara Swisher
  Well, you hear about the grid failing-
5. AWAri Wallach
  Yeah.
6. KSKara Swisher
  ... but you also hear about, um, you know, "Well, I don't want that solar array in my backyard." Or, you know, so it's, it's this combination of, like, already having a certain amount of resources and power that you don't want to give up that, you know, prevents you from imagining futures that might-
7. AWAri Wallach
  So if you don't have it, yeah.
8. KSKara Swisher
  ... involve change.
6:40 – 8:19
Afrofuturism and historical memory: building beyond a long-lived dystopia
1. AWAri Wallach
  Yeah, I mean, look, one, one of the more interesting... Well, look, every conversation was interesting around the world, but, uh, what I... I met with a woman, Ytasha Womack, who's kind of considered... Uh, she wrote the book Afrofuturism, and in our, in our, in our conversation, she's written a lot more since then, um, she said, "Look, to be clear..." She's like, she's like, "We..." She was talking about Black Americans, but in general she was saying, "We've been living in a dystopia for 400 years." Right? So-
2. KSKara Swisher
  Mm-hmm.
3. AWAri Wallach
  ... we've now kind of gone through it and we are looking at this on the other side about what futures do we want to build. So you don't necessarily have to travel to kind of these exotic pla- You can go to Chicago and find people who understand that so much of the future is dictated obviously by our past. You can... You know, she and I recently talked about Haiti in the same way, right? You can look about where we've come from as a harbinger not just of where we might go but where, also where we don't want to go. And it's, again, this is a, a... It's a subtle mindset shift, but I found as I traveled the world that folks who were willing to go there, which was to say the, the, the path, the past is not a path dependency. There is a different future, and it's not a rainbows and unicorns future, but there's a different future that we can choose that centers humanity as opposed to centering technology or late-stage capitalism or Silicon Valley ethos that can get us to where we want to go. The most important thing, though, that I found in the reporting was that people had to have a pretty good idea of where they wanted to go. And again, this wasn't utopia, but it was a world that they wanted... That they were okay with themselves living in, but more importantly, with their descendants living in generations from now.
8:19 – 10:08
Who changed his perspective most: a death doula and lifespan bias
1. KSKara Swisher
  Right. Yeah, let me ask you, uh, you, you talk about you met with a bunch of interesting people in unusual jobs, including a circular economist, a futures generation commissioner, a death doula. Who really blew you away with their perspective? You just mentioned someone who obviously did, but name one or two who, who really blew you away.
2. AWAri Wallach
  I mean, I... Um, look, I love going to, you know, Lawrence Livermore Lab and seeing the fusion center and seeing all this. I grew up on Pop Sci and Wired and all this stuff.
3. KSKara Swisher
  Mm-hmm.
4. AWAri Wallach
  But you just mentioned who really blew me away, which was Oluwa Arthur, who's a death doula. And the conve- You know, what's a death doula doing in a show about the future? But what, a lot of what she and I talked about was the, the kind of the reality that until you can envision a world beyond your own lifespan, so you kind of get over your own lifespan bias, it's very difficult to take actions for the far future. And in the West-
5. KSKara Swisher
  Yeah.
6. AWAri Wallach
  ... we have death anxiety, and in more Eastern cultures, there's more death awareness. That's deeply-
7. KSKara Swisher
  Mm-hmm.
8. AWAri Wallach
  ... tied into kind of cultural and religious underpinnings of how they think about death. A lot of what she does, and we visit her in the high mountains of Arizona where she was doing a death doula training, is getting people to be comfortable with the idea of their own mortality, and we, and, and we know that as people go through that, as they move from, from death anxiety to death awareness, they s- are able to take better actions-
9. KSKara Swisher
  Absolutely.
10. AWAri Wallach
  ... and decisions for the far future. That blew me away. This was gonna be a show about-
11. KSKara Swisher
  Yeah.
12. AWAri Wallach
  Everyone thought, "Oh, this is a show about monorails and jet packs and quantum and nano. Why is there a woman-
13. KSKara Swisher
  Yeah.
14. AWAri Wallach
  ... wrapping people in death shawls?" But that's partly how we get to where we want to go.
15. KSKara Swisher
  Well, yeah, 100%. It's, it's actually, it informs everything I do actually, but it's, what's interesting is the people I cover tend to be much more, "How am I going to stop death?" That, that, that, that's where they're moving now, well, you know, life extension and everything else, which is kind of the opposite.
10:08 – 11:45
Tolerance for uncertainty and the “intertidal moment” between eras
1. AWAri Wallach
  No, I mean, it's, it's fascinating. So, so, so as it, as it happens, my, my wife is a, is a social worker and she focuses on, on hospice and end of life, and, um, at one point I asked her, you know, "What, what is it that you actually do in this work?" And, um, you know, she said a bunch of things that are, you know, obviously important, but, uh, the one that really, really stuck with me was that she helps people, um, uh, increase their tolerance for uncertainty, and, um, and I think that that's what you're talking about with the death doula, right? I mean, it's partly sort of like creating this death awareness, but I think it's also being comfortable with the idea that we actually don't know, you know? (laughs) Like, you don't know how long you're gonna live. You don't know what the future's gonna look like. But creating that sense of possibility and that, that ability to kind of live with and, and, and be in equanimity with an uncertain future, um, you know, to me feels like a, like a, a really, really important not skill for dying but actually, like, skill for living with the world- 100%.
2. KSKara Swisher
  ... in which we're living right now.
3. AWAri Wallach
  And that's the mo- Look, what we talk about in episode two is that we're in this intertidal moment, right? We're on this kind of tail end, at least in the, at least in the West, of this kind of enlightenment rationality thinking, right? If we can quantify it, if we can measure it, we can, we can own it. It's man over nature. And we're seeing that didn't get us as far as we want it to get us, right? And so in this intertidal moment between what was and what will be, um, that uncertainty leads to a certain sense, a heightened sense of anxiety, which then leads people to become more short-term in their thinking, right? They're less likely to go out 10, 15, 20 years, let alone hundreds of years-
4. KSKara Swisher
  Right.
5. AWAri Wallach
  ... and they're gonna think about the next six months. And so that's why being able to live with that uncertainty is so important in this moment.
11:45 – 12:48
AI as ‘immortal machines’: today’s code becomes tomorrow’s legacy
1. KSKara Swisher
  Let me ask you a question. We talk a lot about AI in the future in these, in, in, on this podcast, um, and excitement but also the dangers. You dug into both in the series. Talk about that. That's another inflection point, obviously.
2. AWAri Wallach
  Yeah, I mean, one of the things that became very apparent as we traveled the world meeting both- both with experts in artificial intelligence and also folks who are kind of AI-adjacent is that what we are building, what we are coding right now, and this dovetails on what we were just talking about, are these immortal machines, right? So it's not just about what we do right now, which is very important, but it's the fact that we are coding in either optimistic visions of tomorrow or significant bias that will be with us, much like the COBOL programming in air traffic control systems that's still with us 50 years later, that's what we're coding in right now. So how we think about AI, what we do or do not do right now isn't a six-month thing, isn't a two-year thing. It could be a 20 or a 200-year thing.
3. KSKara Swisher
  Right, absolutely. Uh, Eladia, last question.
12:48 – 13:58
Protopian culture pick: ‘Parenthood’ as everyday future-making
1. LPLydia Polgreen
  What is your favorite, um, protopian piece of culture? Is there something that- that comes to mind that you're like, "This is an example of, like, I wish that there was more of this"? 'Cause you talked about your daughter's bookshelves and dystopian books and things like that. Um, I'd- I'd love a recommendation for something that could maybe evoke that feeling that you're talking about of, like, possibility.
2. AWAri Wallach
  Well, obviously the first thing is the TV show 'cause that's why we made it, right?
3. LPLydia Polgreen
  (laughs)
4. AWAri Wallach
  To evoke that feeling of that sense of possibility. Uh, you know, I'm actually gonna go a little bit backwards here. Um-
5. LPLydia Polgreen
  Good.
6. AWAri Wallach
  I, look, it- it was the old show on NBC called Parenthood. I, look, both... My- my mother-
7. KSKara Swisher
  Oh, that's great.
8. AWAri Wallach
  ... passed away a few years ago. My father passed away when I was 18. I had a loving, amazing family. That being said, I'm now a parent, and it's like, how do you model the best behaviors that you want both in yourself and in your children? Because that is future-making. And in that, in the TV show Parenthood that's been off the air for several years now, I, you know, look, it wasn't perfect. Those families weren't perfect. But the way the parents modeled a way of interacting with society, culture, and their children was protopian for me.
9. LPLydia Polgreen
  That's great.
10. KSKara Swisher
  Protopian.
11. LPLydia Polgreen
  I'm gonna go back and revisit that one.
13:58 – 16:27
What made him optimistic: Hogeweyk and rethinking care for dementia
1. KSKara Swisher
  So speaking of that... Yeah, it's a great show. Speaking of kids, um, this is my last question. Um, you came out of this feeling optimistic about our future, our kids' futures. I have a lot of kids. Um, you have kids. Um, I think about the future a lot, like almost constantly in everything I do, and that's Y. Not just their... Not just my children, um, but their children and everything else, and I think it's easier to be more positive. You have to kind of force yourself when you have children. But I- I don't know about that. I don't know. Some people are quite dark. Um, did you come out feeling optimistic about our future? And point to one thing that makes you optimistic.
2. AWAri Wallach
  So, look, I- I went into the show a li- a little bit down on the state of the homo sapien project, to be totally honest, uh, just because, like- like you all, I- I read the news. This is... What I do is I look at... I'm kind of like an anthropologist from the future looking backwards. Like where did it go right and where did it go wrong? And I try to trim tab us towards the right. Uh, so I went into it a little bit less than where I wanted to be. I came out of it highly optimistic because what I found was every single individual that I met with had an optimism that was buoyed by a sense of pragmatic sensibility around where we are as a species and how much there is left to do. So they weren't seeing this as chapter 10 of 10. They were all seeing it as chapter one or two of a 20-chapter book. Um, the thing... Look, I... Outside of Amsterdam, we visited a place called Hogevak, which is also known... You know, they call it a dementia village. And what they've done, in short, is instead of putting people who are in a memory care situation with neurodegenerative disease in kind of locked wards, they've actually built villages for them where they can shop, they can go to restaurants, all in a safe environment. It took a tremendous amount of willpower by the founders of Hogevak to convince people that this was a good idea. I came out of it optimistic, the entire show, coming out of Hogevak 'cause I realized, yeah, the technology stuff was fascinating in the show. Don't get me wrong. But seeing that people could come together and rethink their base assumptions about how we care for one another in the present and therefore in the future changed how I thought we could actually tackle some of our biggest, uh, most wicked social problems.
3. KSKara Swisher
  Well, that's true. Someone who's dealing with this right now, it's- it's got to change. It absolutely does.