Futurist Explains Why Dystopia Is Not Inevitable | Pivot

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Ari Wallach is a…

   1. KSKara Swisher0:00

      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 Wallach0:17

      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.

   3. KSKara Swisher1:00

      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.

   4. AWAri Wallach1:36

      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-

   5. KSKara Swisher1:52

      Right.

   6. AWAri Wallach1:52

      ... not to contribute to it, but how do we avoid it. Um, and so-

   7. KSKara Swisher1:57

      Right.

   8. AWAri Wallach1:57

      ... 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-

   9. KSKara Swisher3:02

      I love it.

   10. AWAri Wallach3:02

       ... that hasn't happened for quite some time.

   11. KSKara Swisher3:04

       So, people who don't know, that was Uhura and Shatner, I believe, but go ahead.

   12. AWAri Wallach3:08

       It, it, I, I-

   13. KSKara Swisher3:09

       Go ahead.

   14. AWAri Wallach3:09

       ... 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-

   15. KSKara Swisher3:15

       Yeah.

   16. AWAri Wallach3:15

       ... 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-

   17. KSKara Swisher3:26

       Mm-hmm.

   18. AWAri Wallach3:26

       ... 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.

   19. KSKara Swisher3:44

       All right. Lydia?

   20. LPLydia Polgreen3:45

       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?

   21. AWAri Wallach4:52

       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.

   22. KSKara Swisher5:01

       Protopian.

   23. AWAri Wallach5:02

       We'll get to that, we'll get to that in a second.

   24. KSKara Swisher5:03

       (laughs)

   25. AWAri Wallach5:04

       Uh, where that came from was-

   26. KSKara Swisher5:05

       Okay. (laughs)

   27. AWAri Wallach5:05

       ... 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 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-

   28. KSKara Swisher6:16

       No.

   29. AWAri Wallach6:16

       ... there you hear about futures that we wanna live in as opposed to futures that we wanna run from.

   30. KSKara Swisher6:22

       Well, you hear about the grid failing-
2. 15:00 – 16:27

   Well, that's true. Someone…

   1. AWAri Wallach15:00

      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.

   2. KSKara Swisher16:18

      Well, that's true. Someone who's dealing with this right now, it's- it's got to change. It absolutely does.

Episode duration: 16:27