Exploring Technology Governance Futures with the World Economic Forum

A snapshot from the Influence 2035 experiential scenario

This week, the World Economic Forum is hosting its first ever Global Technology Governance Summit (GTGS), convening some 3000 leading technologists, academics, businesspeople, policymakers and political representatives to discuss the sprawling array of fast-moving challenges in this space.

From privacy breach scandals to the Trumpian rise of batshit-crazy conspiracy thinking, the chaotic gaming of stock prices, to misinformation-fuelled mob lynchings, and the weaponisation of online platforms for campaigns of xenophobia or personal vengeance (the latter was the subject of today's feature story on the New York Times Daily podcast)... These are just some recent examples that spring to mind. The pattern is the point. Countless spot-fires, zoomed out, start to look more like a full-blown conflagration.

Anyone who has paid even the scantest attention to such developments might discern a phenomenon also noted long ago by a founding figure both in speculative fiction and in the futures/foresight field*, H.G. Wells, in a BBC radio broadcast from 01932:

“All these new things, these new inventions and new powers, come crowding along; every one is fraught with consequences, and yet it is only after something has hit us hard that we set about dealing with it.”

To shift from a reactive stance to a more proactive or anticipatory one requires changes that are not just political or institutional in nature, but cultural and psychological as well. This is no less true in relation to technology governance than any other topic. As Wells was arguing almost a century ago, collective forethought is essential –– but broadly, it is not a habit we seem to have cultivated with much care or success.

The GTGS event gets underway today, technically hosted from Japan, but taking place entirely online, thanks again of course to the continuing Covid pandemic.

As it does so, a group of graduate designers in our Experiential Futures (XF) class at Carnegie Mellon University have just launched a special set of digital experiential scenarios –– websites and media from the futures to shed light and open up horizons of the topic to explore.

Each site created by XF participants offers a playful rabbit-hole delving into how the world could look decades from now –– in the 02030s, 40s or 50s –– and a provocatively high-resolution glimpse of how some key issues in technology governance might play out.

The usual caveat bears repeating: experiential scenarios should not, unless they are actually offered as such, be treated as predictions or preferences, but instead approached as possibilities to think and feel with. What new questions, potentials, or vantage points can they help us consider?

The storylines and themes contained in these particular projects all build on and respond to the Technology Futures report published yesterday by the World Economic Forum and Deloitte, which was shared with us in draft last month.

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Tech Tea
Tech Tea, a podcast hosted by AI-wrangler Willow and dark web journalist Melanin, focuses on the darker side of the metaverse. Join them as they dive into the recent controversy surrounding powerhouse Global Virtual School.

This podcast from the year 2050 expands on Maiah’s story from the education LEnS of the Technology Futures report.

by Alice Chen, Karen Escarcha, Amrita Khoshoo & Hannah Kim

Influence 2035
Influence 2035 is an event bringing together panelists to discuss the gig landscape. Join us for candid stories from full-time content creators to data providers and robot admins. Click “Attending” on our event to learn more.

This project explores the extreme trends of gig-economy and influencer work appearing in the story of Maple featured in the Technology Futures report.

by Jianzhe Gu, Sanika Sahasrabuddhe & Catherine Yochum

After-Math
After-Math is a global consultancy committed to helping individuals, teams, and organizations regain independence from virtual influence and data-toxicity in order to rediscover the world around us.

This website for a speculative consultancy in the 2040s synthesizes trends, personas, and artifacts from all four scenarios in the Technology Futures report.

by Adam Cowart & Russell Singer

Wikipolicy
Wikipolicy is the policy arm of Wikimedia. Our 2032 Year-in-Review Report shows how we manage accountability, transparency, and logics of care in algorithmic and participatory policymaking advancements.

Seeking to right past wrongs, in this future Wikipolicy is headed by Frank, a former technology executive and character featured in the Technology Futures report.

by Rachel Arredondo, Kylon Chiang, Esther Kang & Jack McClain

Outliers Data Talent
Every company is a data company. Outliers Data Talent connects yours with the data providers you need, from providers of biometrics to location history and more. Top providers are booking fast, so reserve your data talent today.

This hypothetical agency builds on the story of Maple / information LEnS scenario, where job-seekers provide a vast array of personal data around the clock to interested companies in exchange for pay.

by M Kuznetsov, Alex Polzin & Maddy Sides

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Well done indeed to all these Experiential Futures students! Many thanks to the World Economic Forum's Ruth Hickin (Strategy Lead, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution) for the opportunity to contribute to the conversation in this way. Finally, much appreciation to our recent guest respondents, Michelle King, Leah Zaidi and Jake Dunagan, for incisive and sensitive pre-launch project feedback. 

We hope these digital experiential scenarios will be of interest and value both to event attendees, and to many others invested in these important topics. If you find them useful, whether individually or as a set, please feel free to share.

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Update 06apr21: I had mistakenly recalled the number of event participants as being around 1000; the Forum tells me that the correct number is closer to 3000.

* This is the same broadcast popularised by futurist Richard Slaughter as Wanted! Professors of Foresight.

Related:
> Adding Dimensions to Development Futures with UNDP

> Introducing Experiential and Participatory Futures at the BBC
> A conversation about Experiential Futures with The Omidyar Group

> Three Dimensions of Foresight presentation for Columbia University DSL
> The Time Machine assignment brief / full text article

> Theatre in Pandemic / full syllabus on Medium

> The Long Now course at CMU

> Teaching Strategic Foresight / full text pdf

> Adopt-a-vision
> Knowledge Base of Futures Studies

> The Futures of Everyday Life / full text pdf
> Impacting the Social: A conversation with Candy Chang and Bryan Boyer / full text pdf

The legacy of the Biofuture Robot Dog

Image: SPOD

Earlier this month, in conversation with the effervescent Dawn Danby (a regular contributor to the recently retired enviro-blog WorldChanging), she happened to mention a design competition run back in 02002 by science fiction author and design-fiction-impresario-to-be Bruce Sterling, in cooperation with scenario planning kingpins Global Business Network. Ah, design and futures: two great tastes that taste great together.

Said competition, staged by Sterling via the green-tech Viridian list (wound up in late '08, but still in full swing six years earlier), revolved around producing a concept design for a Biofuture Robot Dog:

This is a biofuturistic, green, way out-there ribo-bio-bamboo 'dog', which is transorganic, biomimetic, Viridian, enzymatically postindustrial, and tissue-engineered.

It needs to enter some commercial and cultural space which actual dogs and contemporary robots cannot reach. What does a biofuturist paradog do for tomorrow's consumer? What kind of society buys these gizmos?  Why do people make them, what are they for, what kind of future world would support this device? Try to suggest some convincing answers – answers that can snow real live venture capitalists!

And it's a toy. That's of vital importance. The target is the age 9-12 demographic. It's not for war, terror, prison, or home security, tasty though those sinister applications may be. We want parents buying this. It needs to jump right off the shelf and into their loving arms.

At the risk, perhaps, of muscling in on the beat of Matt Novak over at Paleofuture, who performs the post-post-ironic public service of collecting and blogging images of futures past, I want to add this competition's entries to the early canon of online experiential scenarios (a.k.a., in deference to Bruce, "design fictions" -- which he recently defined as "the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change" -- on which more anon).

As it turns out, Dawn and collaborator Paul Waggoner won the contest with their contribution, SPOD (Super-Personalized Obedient Dawg), which, together with other competition finalists, can still be found online, thanks to the wonders of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Almost ten years old now, this and other playful concept designs remind us that, while the web has changed a great deal in the past decade, the manifesting of hypothetical future possibilities in a contemporary design idiom, as if they already existed in the present, is a communicative strategy evolving in step with whatever media happen to be at our disposal.

Related posts:
> Viridian is dead. Long live Viridian!
> Killer imps
> Greener gadgets
> Object-oriented futuring
> Design fiction is a fact

A tangled web

Image: Screenshot from Web of Fate

A startup site called Web of Fate, launched in July 02008, crowdsources a timeline of users' predictions, goals and other ideas about the future:

Web of Fate is a social experiment that harnesses the collective intelligence of the web to visualize and uncover hidden relationships among future and historical events.

Maybe it's the liberal use of bold type that makes this read like it belongs in the voice bubble of a comic-book's mad scientist.

Web of Fate is ambitiously eclectic. It runs on user submissions, with four options; "make a prediction", "quote a prediction", "create a capsule", or "set a goal", thereby serving as a hybrid of prediction registry and to-do list. There is apparently a "semantic analysis engine" under the hood that produces links between the fragments of submitted content, but exactly what it does, and how it relates to grand questions posed on the site (such as "What can we learn from the past and make the future better?") is unclear.

The visualisation tool looks extremely interesting (see the image above); a cloud of prediction stems hover onscreen in a way that promises a dynamic exploratory interface (a la Visual Thesaurus), but although you can drag the nodes around, this yields no additional insights -- the function appears to have no informational referent. Also, it piles on the disparate elements (users' predictions, reported predictions, and goals) in a way one might hope would be thought-provoking, but which in practice generates more confusion than enlightenment. So a statement like "I will go to the gym everyday" (with no username or date given) sits alongside "$200 dollar oil prediction" (by the end of this year; from Daron in San Jose) and "By 2009, more than one third of IT organizations will have one or more environmental criteria in their top six buying criteria for IT-related goods" (submitted by a user citing IT research outfit Gartner). Those interested in accessing the material primarily through the visualisation may be disappointed when clicking on any prediction takes them to back to a page of static text, and similarly, any given category (users' predictions; quoted predictions; goals) is viewable only in lists, at this point.

A review of the site at Mashable (social networking news) says:

[M]y sense is that registered users will be quite pleased with what they’re offered. Given enough members, this place could become a real hotbed for forecasters.

I find myself wondering whether the conditions are in place, at the moment, for this service to generate that kind of momentum. In their current form, the range of functions seems too diffuse, the quality control too lax, and the interface too unwieldy, to attract and keep a core base of users, who may find more forecasting edification elsewhere at prediction markets like Predictify and NewsFutures, and dedicated "time capsule" functionality at future email services like FutureMe or EmailFuture. There's also the Long Now Foundation's Long Bets project [disclosure: I'm an advisor on it], which has since its inception addressed the quality control issue by requiring users to provide real names and front real money in support of their speculation. The tradeoff, however, is that it doesn't act as a repository where users can freely submit other people's ideas about the future whenever and wherever they appear. (However, Long Bets cofounder Kevin Kelly points out that such a registry has always been part of the plan.) I believe a reputable, well-designed prediction registry has long been needed and is technologically possible, but is yet to be done.∞

According to a Fast Company blog, Web of Fate is the brainchild of Arizona State University student Max Yuan, who, writes Francine Hardaway, "has a head full of projects I hope he has time to complete because they all seem great to me". I'm certainly pleased to see a prediction registry that enables submission of one's own ideas as well as reporting the prognostications of others; the latter an important prerequisite to improving accountability and quality in future-oriented public discourse. Web of Fate makes a brave effort to tap some of the potential for such a forum, but I hope Yuan can find the time to revisit and overhaul some elements of its design. Otherwise, I venture to suggest, this web will (to stretch the metaphor horribly thin) remain too tangled to catch the prey for which it was spun.

∞See futurist David Brin's 02005 article on this topic for more.

[Also posted at Long Views, 14/08/08]

Open Source futures and design

Image: Adaptive Path

Fellow futurist Jamais Cascio recently blogged on working with San Francisco design consultancy Adaptive Path to build scenarios for the future of the web (which can be found here). The end result of that work was a set of concept videos portraying a web browser, dubbed "Aurora", in the year 02018.



The clip above is the second of four illustrating Aurora's use in different settings. (NB The time horizon isn't foregrounded, but watch for a geeky hint in the events menu.) Its development is described in detail at Adaptive Path, and Lead designer Jesse James Garrett helps dispel any possible confusion:

This is not a demonstration of a real product. What you see in the video is a visualization of our ideas created by animators. Technologically, much of Aurora would be difficult or impossible to implement today. However, we expect everything you see to be possible in some form in the future.

The project was instigated by open-source software org Mozilla (makers, among other things, of the Firefox web-browser which I'm using at this moment), as part of Mozilla Labs' Concept Series, which aims "to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole."

Adaptive Path's Dan Harrelson elaborates:

The Aurora browser concept video is our first venture into the new world of open source design and, in keeping with both Adaptive Path’s and Mozilla’s core philosophies, we are sharing our insights into the design process and providing much of the original source material. Our hope is that others will be inspired to try their hand and release their own vision of the web browser of 2018.

Mozilla Labs' call for participation, released 4 August 02008, notes that Concepts submitted may take the form of Ideas, Mockups, or working Prototypes, but emphasises that all should be set loose for others to tinker with, via a Creative Commons license (for Ideas and Mockups) or the Mozilla Public License (for Prototypes).

Some viewers may find the explanatory video clips a little contrived (like, um, every instructional video ever made) but regardless of what you think of them, or the specific design features of the Aurora itself, what's exciting to me here is the emergence, and potential, of this mode of collaboration: design thinking and futures thinking coming together in a forum deliberately established on the commons model. It makes an intriguing complement to the Superstruct strategy (noted here yesterday) of crowdsourcing scenario fragments through the medium of a game.

I ended an earlier post about a similarly outward-facing concept project from Adaptive Path (the Charmr) with these words:

Encouragingly, it seems, companies prepared to share their "reimaginings" with the wider world -- preferred futures , in the form of ideal design concepts -- stand to do well, and also to do good, at the same time.

They've done it again.

Related posts:
> Public service and self-promotion meet on the adaptive path
> Humans have 23 years to go

Introducing Space Collective

From the gallery at Space Collective
(AquaJelly by Festo)

Space Collective is, according to itself, "Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today."

Or, put another way, it's a designery, membership-based web portal for futuristic stuff, spiritually and aesthetically guided by three wise (albeit deceased) men: media maestro Marshall McLuhan, psychedelic prophet Timothy Leary, and astronomy star Carl Sagan.

The site, which is very sleek, highly eclectic, somewhat haphazard, and a little coy about giving you a clear idea up-front of what it's doing, is however explained elsewhere -- by its founder, filmmaker Rene Daalder, in a 02007 interview [rtf] for Volume magazine #10:

Our initial metaphor was to use the Internet to create updates of Carl Sagan’s time capsule on board of Voyager and by the end of each month beam them up into space.

Web designer Folkert Gorder adds:

Besides the episodes and the relating meta text, the additional contents of the monthly Payload are generated both by the site's registered members and Space Collective's writers, curators and designers, providing the front page with a blend of public and "native" content, feeding into the site's continuously updated information and entertainment digest, loosely inspired by Sagan’s time capsule.

It's an intriguing concept and, since being launched late last year, with quite a bit of content already, is great to poke around. The impression I get is of a highly literate (in the broadest sense of the term), technologically informed, future-oriented social network. Some nice examples of user-provided content:

> Wild dinners in 2019 (by Wildcat)
Five chow-time vignettes from 11 years into the future, written for IFTF's upcoming alternate reality game Superstruct.
> The world without us: Chernobyl (by A0013237932294)
Featuring some astonishing, unphotoshopped post-apocalypse photos from the still-deserted ex-Soviet nuclear reactor site.
> Summery Books Too Far Out For Johnny Depp (by wilfriedhoujebek):

[A] list of books I can wholeheartedly recommend you to dive into this summer. They are all completely bonkers and they all start from first principles. [...] Only two of them are fiction and this is no coincidence. [...] One can imagine only a few things, one can belief a whole lot more.

As for the site's "official" content, Daalder's monthly video dispatches, gathered under the modest title The Future of Everything, are rather sensationalistic, but have an ambitiously broad thematic sweep, by no means confined to space (so to speak). There are seven posted to date, but no permalink, so to find them visit the homepage, and under "The Future of Everything" click "View all chapters". (Incidentally, as these videos have been pieced together from existing footage, I really like the fact that the clips' sources are referenced in a sidebar at right -- it would be great to see this more often in documentary filmmaking.)

Daalder's bio states "He is currently lecturing at major universities and art schools in America and Europe about The Future of Everything." I'd love to find out more about these lectures, but multiple searches (Daalder + "future of everything" + lecture, lecturing, university, college, school) have yielded a paltry handful of hits, none of them pointing to any transcripts, recordings or even promotional fare. Oh well.

(Thanks Jesse!)