World Building: Making the Future Real

hi everybody welcome to world building my name is rick lovert i'm the program director of the science and entertainment exchange uh ann can't be with us today she'll be back very soon at a future event uh if you're unfamiliar with the exchange if you are a storyteller you have a question about science as you're making a piece of mainstream media you can call us and we will connect you to a field expert who can contextualize your question and uh and speak to you on the topic we've done over 3 500 consoles since we opened our doors in 2008 uh including many many many feature films i think we've done every marvel film since iron man 2. so if you are stem professional this is the first you're hearing about our work please do put your hand up in the air and contact us sashi will put some info down there below that uh so that you can reach out we're always looking for volunteers people who are interested in being connected to storytellers um you can find a recording of this show on our website or subscribe to the science and entertainment exchanges youtube channel to see events like this after the fact if you're not watching it live you can also sign up on our website to receive invites for these events and also for our weekly newsletter the collider uh unfortunately for boring and technical reasons this event won't be up this week it'll be up on april 18th so apologies for the delay in getting the video up but it will be up i want to thank our sponsors howard hughes medical institute without whose support we could not be doing these events so thank you hartu's medical institute we also get major funding from the alfred p sloan foundation and so many individual donors like you if you gave for today's event thank you so much we do appreciate it it goes right back into this programming and really lights on for us so thank you so today's event we have four incredible speakers who are currently and this is a fact living in the future um we have limited time and more speakers than usual today so i'm not going to give you an in-depth bio on everybody you can find that on the uh event invite that you should have received if you're tuning in um i just got to say that the gerschenfeld's parents must have done something right because their kids neil joel and alan are all entire entirely remarkable human beings i also want to highlight neil in particular because he was instrumental in the creation of the exchange where i have worked for 13 years so thank you so much neil for that i also want to say thank you to alex mcdowell in particular as a founding member of our board he and neil have been critical members of our brain trust for more than a decade so i want to thank both of you for that um also i want to thank our discussants blair and kimberlin for joining us on stage today um if you have a question at any point uh while our speakers are speaking it's a little different format than usual um our speakers will be speaking after a short video but if at any point you have a question you can put it right down here in the q a and i will be uh dutifully uh making note and trying to get to as many questions as possible we have an excruciatingly short q a period this time around we'll get to as many questions as we possibly can at the end of the event um and then each of our speakers will have one minute for a closing uh comment at the end of the of the event it's a little bit different than usual my rabbit hole this week is the eighth largest dutch city that was created with the future in mind at every step the city planners also used a game to get input from the input from the community on how the city should be developed so i thought it was particularly relevant to today's conversation so check out that link if you're interested in going a little deeper on that and with that we are going to watch a short video and then our speakers will be joining us on stage so thank you everybody here we go meiche in 2000 when i designed minority report the writer and i started on the same day and so without a script we had to develop a world and that really changed my practice and launched world building as we know it minority report became known for its accurate predictions of our present and future it proved that imagining and portraying something that does not yet exist in the world was a way to actually enable it to exist in the world we weren't being so clever we were just listening well if we are able to tell a convincing story that will immerse an audience in a completely different kind of outcome and if we can thread this back into our present and reveal the steps we have to take as designers as media makers as educators as manufacturers as scientists to shift direction and move towards that vision then maybe there's an opportunity here to re-engage the idea that storytelling actually changes the world experimental is built on world building design systems that are the foundation of our work for industry institutions education and entertainment it's a powerful engine for change in every medium and platform imaginable [Music] so it's great pleasure to be here at the event particularly with with my friends the three gershom belts but also to continue the conversation with science and entertainment exchange and incredibly important work they're doing um i started working in narrative design in 1975 i became a production designer in 1990 working in film um a quick um thought that the production designer has always been a world builder production designer has to consider all of the options of a film um until the camera starts rolling we're in a 360 degree space so i think that um it's kind of intrinsic in what we do uh to do production design but um ah sorry uh with minority report it changed radically um what was unusual was that as as the video said i started on the same day as the writer um and we had a half page synopsis from stephen and the the the script didn't really come into place for for several months um and and we just had a basic provocation which was the 50 years in the future um it's a benign world and there are a group of pre-cogs who have changed the the situation in the in in washington dc but the major provocation was from stephen this is not science fiction it's future reality and we were then forced to go outside the typical um art department film kind of relatively close research space and have to go out into the world which is really where neil comes in is you know he's largely to blame for for what happened next um when we first met um with neil and a group of experts i remember and neil wilkes will will correct me if i'm wrong that neil said i was reading the script on the plane um i'd never thought to consider precognition but i think we can do it and and that idea that what we were doing could actually by engaging in a kind of um deep dive into reality projected forwards through the imagination uh it led us directly to an amazing group of people to mit media lab uh to all of the people that neil introduced us to there to apple to lexus to experts in in advertising um and it was deeply uh and immediately the notion of world building kicked in um the other thing that happened which i think is is not necessarily so understood is that we move from being almost completely analog production to being entirely digital for example this craft that tom cruise is standing on was built with rapid fabrication by chrysler company in san francisco and chrysler's this was the first time they had ever had digital uh design input they they said that the only paper that was involved in the design was the purchase order so we transitioned into an entirely digital component and flipped the model of production upside down then continuing to work in film i was asked to do the man of steel which was an amazing opportunity to sort of redesign the superman logo for one thing um but we asked a fundamental provocation which was why does superman have an s on his chest um he's from krypton they don't speak english and and that emerged that turned into sort of an analysis of of what that s could mean which became a sort of a an idea that the s was a glyph amongst many glyphs it also led to the idea that the curve was essential there were no straight lines on krypton and so that turned that sort of uh rolled into the idea that it was an organic world we looked at carl blosfeld and the science of of plants as a structural component of biology is the as the fundamental um driver of the of the aesthetic but at some point um zack snyder the director asked us a complicated difficult question which was what does the uh written language of kryptonian looked like and so we brought in this linguist anthropologist from uh university of british columbia um uh christine schreyer and spent three months developing an entire alphabet and really dove into what linguistics and and the um the idea of of writing kind of transmitting uh the the social social politics this was a object-based language rather than rather than the person based language and if you have your krypton dictionary with you during the movie it's all um it's all real um the first sort of well one of the direct contacts with science entertainment exchange as i moved into dreamworks and started working in animation uh was the b movie um a frivolous frivolous film about um bees in central park but we wanted to know about bee behavior and we called science endemic exchange dr ann merchant and um and were recommended an entomologist a bee expert um and we said i'm not sure how you can help we're talking about bees who stand uh wear clothes and drive cars um but he founded an interesting challenge and um and we learned a lot we learned a lot about bee behavior and it actually drove the way in which the waggle dance for example became a component in the narrative um the other film i have shown here in the bottom right is the lawnmower man 1990 when i was the first first film i worked on with an amazing director called brett leonard who was deeply involved and engaged in silicon valley and new technologies brought the idea of virtual reality to the um to the script and we immediately engaged this as the first sort of public exposure ever to virtual reality um and we had to understand what it was capable of it drove the narrative and so we spent time with nasa with a scientist called scott fisher um i wore a very early and very huge clunky uh piece of vr equipment with uh haptics but and moved around in a kind of 3d or or three-color 2d world with the ability to reach out and touch something in a two-day world transformative um for me and then that has led to um working at usc and being deeply involved in vr and mixed reality since um 2012. but i think just to to come back full circle um and pass over to neil now to talk a little bit more about his engagement in minority report and how he pushed our science forward oh great uh thanks alex it's a pleasure to be here with uh all of you so uh my background started with just friend of a friend i was advising some holiday hollywood movies one of the interesting ones was minority report uh stephen didn't want to make it unless he could be convinced he could bring the authority to it he had brought to his earlier movies the emotional authority but now it was the authority of telling the future and so he wanted to be convinced you could build the future and so an amusing high point for me was teaching giving a mini lesson in quantum mechanics to stephen spielberg where i explained non-locality and entanglement in bell pairs and that's what led to the look and feel of the precogs they're in upon creating entanglement with the community around them um and it was a wonderful project a lot of technology came out of it like john under coffler turned the gestures in the movie into real technology this this incredible effort to build the movie so coming out of that then the national academies had asked me to advise their program on public communication of science so i went to dc and the grand building had a very formal day with very impressive people um and at the end of the day i i didn't say anything intimidated by the weight of all of this and at the end of the day i finally screwed up my courage to say you must be joking because the whole day was about pamphlets the whole day was about the pamphlets they're going to print and which pamphlets they're going to print and so i said you know that that's crazy these pamphlets just aren't going to have an impact but i know some cool people in hollywood do you want to go have a visit and so that led to with the national academies with suzanne and and then with colleagues at ict we ran a meeting on science in hollywood and the dramatic outcome was the movie maker said gasp you would actually talk to us we didn't think you would want to talk to us and the scientists said gasp you would actually want to talk to us we didn't think you would want to talk to us there was this each side assumed the other wouldn't want to talk to them but one of the key insights which is at the heart of science entertainment exchange and i really attribute to alex is you don't need the scientists to do the story the storytellers are good storytellers what you need them for is the back story um what are the words that go with what's happening what's happening behind you there's a really cool moment on set on minority report where people are running around in the tears and stephen stopped everything to say what's that person doing there because it you can't just pretend to run around you actually have to understand what function you're doing and so creating compelling backstory is at the heart and it's great content it's much better than what just somebody could make up and it fills popular media with really good science context the great work that the exchange has done so looking forward the program i run cba i was created to study the boundary between digital and physical i never understood that interface i'm proud to be attributed to saying computer science was the worst thing to happen to computers or to science because it's unphysical and so we've done things like the first faster than classical quantum computations part of the birth of internet of things part of collaborations and creating synthetic life and one of the core things that's come out of that research is a road map up to the replicator that in the same way computing went from one to a thousand to a million to a billion to a trillion mit made the first computerized manufacturing machine in 1952 it led to machines making things then work on machines making machines and then assemblers and self-assemblers and all of those things are happening today in the lab but it ranges from impact today to decades in the future leading up to the replicator roadmap and there's been a really interesting interplay we've had a number as the science really gets ahead of the science fiction we've had a number of really interesting science fiction authors come to learn about science reality uh to bring back into the fiction sort of the causality going backwards um so then given that parallel between computing because today we're at the equivalent of the birth of the internet stage for this parallel in communication computation now fabrication for the national science foundation we started an outreach program create setting up community fabrication labs mini versions of the big lab at mit but big versions of what will fit in your pocket in the future these fab labs we set up one with a grand old man of community activism in boston mel king we thought we'd go back to work and they accidentally went viral there's about 2 000 now and 125 countries they double every roughly year and a half what's come to be called lasse's law after sherry lasseter um and uh coming out of that is um ultimately a new vision of how you create technology in society i'm showing uh bonus material for the movie the martian where instead of having to do the whole industrial revolution on mars you essentially create life in non-living materials to bootstrap a civilization that's bonus material for the movie the martian back on earth we have a fab city program working on cities being able to produce what they consume so to teach the skills to do that darpa funded my lab and alan's company eli to do fab the game and the idea was to teach the skills for this world of digital fabrication and design my team wanted to make just a vr version of the lab as it exists today alan's designer said that was boring his designers wanted to make this crazy scheme of you know far in the future and you're in a hyperspace jump in your turbo drive quantum crystals have fractured and we said that doesn't make any sense and it forced both of us to meet in the middle it forced us to take seriously where would this lead if we succeeded beyond what we're going to do next week it forced the designers to ask what is actually physically realizable and collaborations like that finally grew into the book i wrote with joel and alan designing reality normally when i would give a talk about the research we're doing people are excited and clap and say that's very exciting and if you listen carefully in the back you can hear joel and alan groaning and they're groaning because they believe i'm right about the technology but they think i'm being very naive about how technology comes out in society and in the same way libertarian computing designers didn't anticipate spam fake news and income inequality the same thing risks happening today and so we wrote this book to look at if we're heading towards 50 years of scaling bits to atoms how do we shape it today rather than waiting for all the things that can go wrong and so with that i'll hand off to allen who did not get the technology genes in the family thanks neil uh it is true neil took all the technology genes before i was born um so when i first learned about the science and entertainment exchange i thought this is awesome you know amazing scientists working with amazing filmmakers but i did ask what about video games which are possibly the most powerful medium in the world when you think about the billions of hours of lean forward engagement and both mediums are powerful they're powerful in different ways um before i come back to fab to the game i'll talk a little bit about what's unique about games as opposed to linear media and i'll talk about it from two perspectives play to learn and make to learn in terms of play to learn or play for impact games are invitational you take on a role and identity it might be a scientist an adventurer all sorts of different identities you step into a an interesting role you go into a problem space you have challenges and crucially you have agency you have agency to tackle those challenges games are about verbs there they can be action verbs as well as thinking verbs uh and as you act and this is something that people often miss uh the failure is fun it's evocative and safe but crucially you get feedback you get feedback from the game you get feedback from peers you get feedback from mentors from the community to level up towards a goal that you're invested in now often these goals are just playful goals as as the designers have designed them but they could be amazing real world goals like imagining possible futures when i look at the the media landscape right now um i see a lot of dystopian uh future storytelling uh whether it's movies tv video games novels it's astounding and i think it speaks to a lot of the zeitgeist in the world but i think it's it's essential that we balance the dystopian visions of the future with evocative aspirational but achievable visions so we have collective visions that we can then build the stable steps towards urging into existence which brings us to the make to learn side of games games are are not only are they interactive from a play space but increasingly games are about making things if you look about two of the most popular games in the world minecraft and roblox reaching hundreds of millions of youths hundreds of billions of hours of deeply engaged creation and the modding of games most games these days are moddable so the idea that you are not only in a play space but a make space and imagining and building these possible futures is a largely untapped potential so when neil talks about the very powerful third digital revolution in in digital fabrication one could build dystopian futures of bad people making bad things of great uh um you know only certain people having access to these powerful technologies but there also could be amazing aspirational visions which you'll hear from blair and other visions of how this technology can truly democratize the means for production but we need to visualize those futures we need to narrative those futures to enable people to collectively urge them into existence and that was the idea behind fab the game so in terms of unpacking the the posi you know mitigating risk and maximizing the positive i'll hand it to my brother joel thanks alan and sorry just in transition alan i think it's worth really briefly mentioning those two met in a great collaboration with the cook in the tribal council in alaska that has great cultural traditions and terrible challenges and we help them set up fab labs to use modern tools with traditional craft and allen helped create a video game studio to do alaska native storytelling through the medium i think is a great example that was lurking on your slide yeah just one note on that i mean as we look to the future it's important it's important to also look to the timeless practices and values of the past that have sustained cultures for years things like interdependence and and sustainability so it's a good point good job um and i'll actually come back to that in a minute but today i'd like to talk about the intersection of world building and social science and in particular uh what if teams organizations and even institutions were agile adaptive and inclusive as they co-evolved with accelerating technologies that's essentially where i'd like to go with my comments today but i'd like to start with the picture that you see in the upper right hand corner of dominique i took this picture 18 years ago in the very first fab lab that neil uh and mel king launched uh in the south end of boston and what's important about this is is three things first you see the joy in making and we're going to talk about that in various ways and you'll hear more about that from blair but second uh i'm told that uh she is now a graduate student in engineering but we're not sure and that's the third thing which is the not sure what you see next to her is a report that i helped to co-author a year ago for the national science foundation on the missing millions that are not currently involved in research computing and data but who could be and should be and whose voices need to be heard and so as a nation we have what people call a stem challenge around the folks who are not part of the technology conversation and when we when you hear from kim you'll hear about some of the federal efforts to be more inclusive the nsf is one of many federal agencies that are trying to advance equity in new and deeper ways but if we go underneath the picture of dominique you'll see the sort of directory to the world build that was done with the university of alaska which alex led and i had the honor to be part of and you can't see it but one of the nodes on the map that you can explore did involve a network of fab labs that were locally self-sufficient cutting dependence on global supply chains and we'll hear more about that from blair but if you look next to the missing millions report is an article that alan neil and i wrote for this loan management review called the promise of self-sufficient production and here we really posed the question in this third digital revolution uh following digital computation and communication with digital fabrication um what would it look like in terms of the social systems as well as the technology for people to be more self-sufficient the last thing that i'd like to talk about is to really interrogate those organizational forms i lead a group called the stakeholder alignment collaborative i co-lead it with a number of folks who are amazing and we've been studying the multi-stakeholder consortia that are associated with research data and computing we argued in the article in the stanford social innovation review that you see illustrated to the far left that you don't solve a grand societal challenge with the big complex organizational structure you start with something that's small agile and adaptive and we have that align act together and separately adjust at model so people can accomplish together what they can't do separately and what you see in sort of a wallpaper below on the slide are a set of multi-stakeholder consortia that i've helped uh and worked with over the years either helping to facilitate launch or sustainment and the reason that they're there is really a 400-year story if we go back to the 18th century the dominant organizational and institutional form was the guild or the craft organization if we go to the 19th century we see the rise of the hierarchy and mass production in the 20th century we see the rise of the global multinational multi-divisional institutional form and i'm arguing that the 21st century will be marked by multi-stakeholder consortia that cross organizational and institutional lines in fact the science exchange is a multi-stakeholder consortia and our own counting of the emergence of these in science uh is that they are increasing by an order of magnitude in the last 20 years that multiple stakeholders come together to accomplish together what they can't do separately and frankly the challenges that our society faces cross organizational institutional lines and with the accelerating technologies that we've been talking about the need for this is not only crucial but in fact institutions have to be adaptive in more agile ways because the pace of change is accelerating so with that uh i think we can go back to alex to sort of bring us back home with the whole idea of world building thanks joel i'm getting way too much screen time obviously here um i think you can hear in everything that that neil and alan and joel have been saying that world building has another side of the coin it's not just a back story and a foundation which you know has been essential for entertainment media but it is a way of um creating change and since we started the notion of world building world building as two words as opposed to the kind of game um uh semantic of whirlwind is a single world uh word the um the the the difference has been this evolution towards narrative design systems which is really storytelling uh system design and and systems sorry systems and design itself um and using that as a powerful force for change so this combination of story as imagination [Music] with design as the implementation of something that can be executed and produced and a system which we use as foundationally this idea of a holistic system where all of the notion all the parts of of storytelling connect and this in this circle you see here which we call the mandala but is also fundamental to the idea of collaboration and co-creation so um that there's a few examples here and one you heard a little bit about in the video albedo which was a um a project for a group of of a bedouin a tribe in called albida a village in in saudi um and the issue here was translation um and and i think that where world building really was powerful was that it was combining this idea of storytelling and a visual narrative that you could move from a tribe who didn't speak arabic or english but who could completely take control over their own um their own future uh looking at sustainable housing looking at permaculture as a series of examples of both video and illustration a way to dive into that world um in a very different way and and in a project that that we're working on at the moment and have been for the last three years in the top right here is a project called the world in a cell the challenge here was again one of translation dr ray stevens at usc who runs the bridge institute and as a molecular biologist challenged us to say how can storytelling create a new language for molecular biology how can the idea that we can build and design a visual language allow uh this new system to be used for collaboration among scientists outside the the the the ring of crystallography molecular biology and then how could it be used to translate out to a larger public how could it be used to teach molecular biology in high schools and undergrads and graduate and museums so we worked very closely and continued to work in a completely integrated way with an art science group formed from the usc bridge institute and the amazing dr helen berman who has been co-pi with me on this project and we we're building a system which is absolutely true to science um but is using a language which is fundamentally a system of systems um a series of tetrahedra a single amino acid that can be multiplied it's infinitely scalable and can be fit together in multiple ways on an edge on a surface on a point there's almost nothing that you can't express with this tetrahedra you also find and because we we put this immediately into virtual reality that there had never been a time in history where proteins could be seen side-by-side proteins and molecules that the massive range of scale has never been possible to see essentially the scale between a mouse and a mountain in a single space now you can go into vr and experience this relationship and now we're trying to get more and more science-based and more more scientifically accurate um and the next stage of this is to allow scientists to go into question these these models and derive data from them um completely different project uh we're working with the cook inlet uh tribal council um the alaskan indigenous uh group connected to 200 tribes in in alaska and we have been looking at the future of youth connected to 10 000 years of innovation and yet um not being clear about how they could move their story forward into the future and this represents um a look at the future of work and the future of um of resources and connects directly to the to the university of alaska project that joel mentioned uh in the bottom is a project we've been doing with ford uh called um uh the city of tomorrow and the living street and the idea here was to place us on the ground the human relations see the human relationship between uh the intelligent city the in the intelligent a vehicle and infrastructure and how can the human be absolutely at the center of that and be driving both sides um we've been looking at climate change and on building uh five cities 50 years in the future for the american society of civil engineers in this case we are looking towards its aspirational future we're using imagination to extrapolate forward um 50 years is a is a fair way out to consider what the reality would be for civil engineers but it's designed to be a provocation machine it's designed to take into account um climate change primarily but also the massive shift in in technology uh the massive shift in in the needs for engineering if if the water level rises afoot the entire coastline of the world changes um the engineer is sort of central civil engineer to the way that the world is is going to be uh developed in the future um so this bottom image is of a sustainable city on the ocean a floating city imagining that it is more sustainable to move out to the ocean than to move in the land and then finally in the the image above that is um what we're calling a mega city it continues to be a project with the cooking er with the with the um associated civil engineers american civil engineers um looking at a massive city and in this case now fully interactive this provocation to machine allows engineers to go in in the education space and in in the institutional space of of the civil engineers um 145 000 people looking at their own future now to move in and to question the world to see this model that we've built that is embedded with with questions and provocations that allow the engineers to go into this world and derive a massive amount of data uh all of which is designed to make them think differently about the future um and and uh if i could just intrude for time to stay on schedule we need to go to blair yeah yeah sorry okay i've i've said quite enough sorry to intrude so i'm delighted to then introduce uh blair who's doing remarkable work right at the intersection of uh making and world building blair uh thank you um drawn a lot of inspiration from a lot of folks on the panel so it's a pleasure to join you uh i guess a little bit of a ramp up the back story um you know my a lot of my formative years were in the context of the black church in detroit and um although i'm not a deeply religious person it is a very kind of pragmatic core institution with food co-ops and repair programs and other sorts of things so i had been involved in kind of community institution building in different ways i went off to mit the little computer stuff some engineering stuff some complex systems dynamic stuff circle back around and have some kind of success in entrepreneurship and decided to really explore what self-sufficiency resilience would kind of look like so it did the farm thing grow your own food harvest your own energy and found out that it was feasible but extraordinarily hard work and not something everyone was going to do i got involved in education and developed some experiential curriculum for students in detroit and really found that if people have access to the means of of production to be able to create things their sense of agency shifts we were technically dealing with what people called kind of at-risk youth which were very bright kids who decided to disconnect for several reasons and so if they're given the means to be able to actually create things that they can imagine then their mentality kind of shifts from one to scarcity and competition to kind of abundance and creation and there's a very empowering experience we started with kind of natural environment things so permaculture creating aquaponics systems et cetera i've been keeping an eye on this fab lab thing out of the corner of my eye and so shot off an email to uh lass and uh asked about starting a fab lab she pointed me to the website i ordered all the equipment and sent an email back said i'm ready to go so i signed up for neil's course and uh kind of figured out what fab labs are really about in this extraordinarily high leverage kind of component of what we've been doing so we have worked with young folks involved in both natural environment things and digital fabrication creating transportation or you know housing structure examples and it was extremely empowering we wanted to take it another step and really think about it we kind of disconnected people from all the things they hate doing but they have to in order to get by and if people could focus their creative energy on doing the things that were meaningful to themselves their family their community what might that look like so we started experimenting with that a bit and ran into difficulties and that you can't do that because this and this political structure doesn't allow you to do it this regulatory structure doesn't allow you to do it and who are you all to do this kind of organizational structure and so we kind of charge you trying to figure out how can we organize ourselves to be more successful with this so we ventured off into some non-traditional areas and that kind of shifted me in the direction of where we are right now which is idlewild michigan which is a historic african-american community that's got deep roots for over 100 years in the united states it was just nominated as a national historic landmark but it has a history really involved in self-sufficiency self-determination and self-reliance that was forged during times of segregation but really ideas of competition and all those kind of things were really in play here for a very long period of time it's a very vibrant community if you look up idaho michigan it's got a very interesting history when the laws changed for more equal access um a lot of the things that forced people to be within the community kind of dissipated and so it kind of skipped a generation or so but people are coming back because there was a missing aspect of being able to work with within community and spend your time for things that you found found were very valuable and so we are in the process of working with people who are coming back to the community and are in the community to kind of think about what thriving really means and looks like and what are pathways for people who are divorced from access to a lot of the normal resource base to perhaps use what's at their disposal to create what they want so having access to what neil talks about in terms of universal or ubiquitous digital fabrication is really kind of about equally distributing the means of production and creation within you know everyone's capacity and so we're not there now but keeping an eye on this technology curve as the brothers laid out well in the book it's actually coming and we're talking about building kind of these human systems which aren't on the same exponential curve as these technology systems so it's going to take us a long time to get there and so we're actually kind of behind however we're trying to intercept something that we know was coming and if you're a gearhead you might believe that but a lot of other folks that's kind of a really foreign concept which brings me to my interest in the whole world building piece because what we find the most is that when people dwell in this and spend some time they really recognize that this is a potential game changer and it's worth thinking about how we will reorganize ourselves around that however the majority of people are struggling to see what a day week month in the life of someone would be if the circumstance changed where you had access to technology that allows you to use indigenous resources to create the things that you need energy durable goods or whatever and so to be able to kind of again conceptualize that is one of the key hurdles that we're dealing with in addition to um you know how do you motivate around aspirational thinking for things which are just coming into foggy kind of visibility so what i wanted to kind of discuss a little bit in the world building area you know that's not an area that we have great expertise although we are doing a great a lot of great on the ground work one of the key things is people see futures in the context of some major you know an asteroid hit or climate change clobbered or they had a nuclear war and they're too many variables it changed at the same time for someone to identify with that future you know how could we create a scenario where people could visualize what they're present in with a few changes like access to digital fabrication and how that might allow people to reorganize our social structure to be able to then own our own time in ways that we can't now and to find you know justification and and value in experiences and relationships instead of the grind and shiny blingy things so that's the thing i wanted to kind of the question i wanted to bring to this distinguished group is is there a way to do a more current reality-based version of this aspirational future that doesn't involve some imaginary calamity and um before we dive in on uh blair's really important question uh i'd like to uh hear also from uh kim kim is a national uh policy and thought leader on issues of equity in organizations and institutions what is not as well known uh i know her through the work at the program on negotiation at the harvard law school is she's also very thoughtful about improvisation in negotiation and i'm wondering kim if you might react to this world building through not just a lens of equity but also a lens of improvisation well hi everybody and thank you joel um certainly this is a been a fascinating exchange uh and it's also so terrific to meet joel's brothers uh as well as uh everyone else on this uh call so when i think about world building uh i think a lot about uh policy making actually because uh from where i said uh thinking about policy we're thinking about how to create the we want communities to enjoy we try to think about the lives that people might be able to live if for instance their government was producing equitable outcomes in communities or if education were readily available to all in ways that uh allow their talents to to grow and to shine and for people to it that's what we do all the time one interesting thing about that is when we think about uh work that we've been doing through an executive order that president biden issued about a year ago on equity we've realized that we can sit in our offices and on our zoom rooms and we can begin to determine what the particular ingredients might be for a world in which people might thrive but if we leave out the people themselves and if we don't invite them to co-create the story with us then our story will always be incomplete and to make the connection to the media i think about uh the fact that with all policy there are always unintended consequences we just usually don't take the time to play out what they will be we stick to our preferred stories and our preferred characters and we forget about the characters on the fringes who may wind up throwing off that story down the line and when we think about it in the world of movie making you know we could think about jurassic park you know we create a world and then that world turns out to bite us back and one of my favorite book titles is when things bite back when i think also though about uh movies and cinema i think about a world like wakanda that exists within the world we can see but where a different kind of thriving is also possible with different stories so in this notion of world building and the technology that's needed i would argue the really critical part of it is not just the worlds we build for others but it's also the co-creation of worlds which is i think what you're talking about with gamers that's not a a world i myself know personally but to imagine that you have some of the pieces of that new world and if you're entrusted with trying to put it together and if you have to work with partners that's where the improvisation would come in how do you trade off ideas back and forth how do you make trade-offs back and forth how do you get certain things done now and hope you'll be able to accomplish other things later or not so i think there's an important um narrative story here that links the world that all of you are doing with that of public policy making when we think about it in the abstract you know in the guts of an executive order or a regulation maybe you don't think of world building but when people are standing around that white board or they're on a zoom room and they're saying what is the world we want for americans for kids in our cities for kids in stem programs that's where i think we begin to see some of the design elements of policy that are so resonant with what you all are talking about today great rick do you want a guide q a yeah absolutely um i'll uh i'll do it like this if it's okay with you guys just so that we don't get the brady bunch screen um i think for the whole uh panel i'm not sure who would be the perfect person maybe neil or alex uh we got a question from janet is there enough of an archive uh from the past to sort of see how close we saw the future meaning now in the past do you guys have a sense of that well let's see my one minute answer is for the kinds of things i described i'm making bold predictions about the present so slightly overused but william gibson famously said the future is here today but not uniformly distributed and that's what exactly i'm doing i'm not making predictions i the future is here today but it's not widely distributed for the kinds of things i described alex yeah i think my my one minute answer is that i think world building is an arc from the past to the future there is no future without a really deep understanding of how we got here i would i would would suggest that the present doesn't exist actually because we're constantly moving forward um and but but i don't think it works if you get this idea of futurists very different than world building which is that you're actually building a world which is based on deep knowledge um so so absolutely they they are in extra inextricably connected so i think the next question is uh for joel and possibly kimberlyn ii uh the someone was asking about the background i had with a vertically integrated garden in cities basically and they were wondering uh how easy that is to implement uh and whether or not it's it's difficult you know when you come run into cities and bureaucracies and things how hard is it to implement these future visions of of cities so this question's from hana yeah no i know kim will also want to comment we both come from a world where we assume stakeholders have both common and competing interests and so it will be a negotiated interaction alan said earlier that too many of the future visions of the world are dystopian i will also say that some of them are overly utopian in the sense that they assume everyone is holding hands and singing kumbaya together when we think about how to build a future world imagine one where people deeply disagree but also have constructive mechanisms to engage those issues in productive ways and joe i have to say the footnote of microcosm is the three of us writing the book where we deeply disagreed it was a miserable experience but we found a constructive way i actually loved the experience but [Laughter] but but you might also want to say about the negotiated dynamic about deeply competing uh values principles and ideologies no absolutely uh negotiation uh in the sense that you're describing a jewel is absolutely the case when people come together because they have uh different ideas about the world they're living in now even if the present doesn't exist let alone the world they want to live in in the future the other point i would say and i think this is critical and it goes back to essentially the stakeholder comment that i made earlier is that sometimes we don't recognize the worlds that people have already built the expertise that they have already deployed that it may not look the same in different communities it may not be familiar to us i think about where my grandmother grew up in the lower ninth ward of new orleans not very many resources but if you look past the surface you would see people who were deeply connected to one another and who had been able to um survive a great many things uh before uh hurricane katrina and survive well by relying on one another and that's the kind of connectivity that we also need to pay attention to i think this question might be uh best answered by blair and or neil the question is what are the risks of science and entertainment partnering to manipulate the priorities of technology creation above real applications to solve real world problems of inequity poverty and climate change etc and what is the ethical responsibility of these types of partnerships larry you want to start i'm looking forward to media manipulating people's minds into some constructive visions of the future i mean it's not just uh it's just evil there's a constructive aspect of this also and i think people need an opportunity to see some different ways that they could operate in order for it to be something tangible that they're willing to work towards so i'm going to take the risk of the negative side to try to get the positive side and then picking up first i want to know blair asked a huge important question that i think is really a homework assignment blair's question about how do we marry everything we're talking about we're not going to do in the next four minutes i think this whole program is an invitation to spend the next few months with blair working through blair's question to do justice to it um but but quickly rick we have we've run these labs in shooting war zones in religious conflict sectarian conflict at boundaries with refugee camps at all kinds of red blue state everywhere you can think of and what's really interesting about them is while those head-to-head battles are being fought this is sort of an end run around it what isn't getting covered is this is an alternative to fighting those battles and there's wonderful stories some of them we tell in the book about these parts of the world where people see disaster in battle and they don't see the people over here using these tools to really invent a different future and what's important is they're leaky there aren't real points of control to shut them down and further people who should be threatened by them who don't realize how disruptive they are don't realize how disruptive they are um and so that's why i'm pretty hopeful that there isn't sort of a grand overarching something uh that'll shut this down uh i i love that note on but i don't think that alan got a question in this q a segment so i just want to make sure that allen gets one um so we have a question from janet about you mentioned roblox as an example of collaborative building but janet was concerned about whether or not the life lessons are actually more transactional than that do you have thoughts on that yeah it's a great question and you know what there are lots of different ways to tackle the question but i'll i'll turn it into a thought experiment that ties into the last thread that that uh neil and blair talked about which is you know roblox is amazing at helping kids become creators not just consumers and doing it in a social context and they're very good at that but but robots wasn't designed for people to reflect on what what is a metaverse what could a metaverse be to ask the what if why not world building questions so i'll turn the question into a thought experiment that could perhaps address the broader question that came up from blair which is if world building were taught in schools at every age group if there were environments like roblox and minecraft that provided the scaffolding around helping youth debate discuss the what if why not questions of what we want this metaverse to be and whether that's even the right terminology given where it came from i i think you would start to get very interesting visions of the future and perhaps that eight-year-old would have a really thoughtful conversation with the father around what is the metaverse and where is it going games don't teach they're more an invitation to learn and often that invitation is discussions around the experience so it was a great question and i think it's a great prompt for where we could go um there's two minutes left can i suggest we each do a 30 second wrap up but only 30 seconds absolutely so why don't we do it just in the order we presented alex yeah i think that um when we talk about storytelling it storytelling is not a western tradition storytelling is a tribal tradition and i think we've absolutely forgotten that it is not a single author that tells stories it's a collaborative group and so i think that that is underlying fundamental to world building that's why it doesn't turn utopian just open um and it's also a vertical slice when you're talking about a story you're slicing into a world it's infinitely scalable and the most powerful stories happen at the street corner level that's where we can actually gather around something and and create change and then it extrapolates out great uh i'll pick up with something i said at the first science in an entertainment exchange and nobody had any idea what i was talking about which is the science entertainment exchange assumes you can tell the difference between a scientist and a non-scientist and all of these tools are democratizing not just making but science in fact we're running a meeting with nist and doe on open metrology um later this year and so if anybody can become a scientist there's great challenges but even greater opportunities to not communicate science and this picks up on nick's question to not just communicate from scientists to non-scientists but empower people to become scientists and that for me the science entertainment exchange has succeeded at the first epoch this is the next epoch ellen well to build on where where i left off i think world building as a practice should be in elementary school middle school high school continuing ed it is a remarkable practice it's a social practice and i think it will enable us to create these collective evocative aspirational but achievable visions of the future okay joe when i facilitate the launch of this multi-stakeholder consortium what amazes me is people can write a charter and a vision and go out and do things and there's no place that you have to register or sign up uh and so as we think about a world in which people are learning to do world building the amazing thing is that they can then build these social systems that go with the technical systems and do so on their own and um in fact to build the kind of future that we would all like to be part of there and then kim to wrap up oh yeah i guess i would say um i see a tremendous number of people who are completely frustrated with a lot of the way things are working right now and are very active being away from something but they don't know they know what they don't like about what's going on but and they know kind of what they would like about something in the future but they don't know what it might feel like so i think it's really critically important given this time period where people know they need to do something different to have something concrete that they can kind of visualize on what that might look and feel like and last word from kim you know i would uh just speak to the importance of curiosity and curiosity is most important when you are actually not interested in what the other person has to say that's when you need curiosity because if you're listening to someone and you care about what they're saying you're already interested so if listening is important to storytelling we also have to make sure that we are curious when people tell us what they've heard from the stories we tell all right with that i want to thank all of our speakers today thank you so much for coming i want to thank everybody who asked a question we had over 40 of them and five minutes to answer i want to thank everybody who donated to this event especially those who joined the who donated at the supporter level we can't do these events without you um and i want to thank courtney sloane sachi girvin jeff fishman amechi uk and uh everybody who helped us technically produce this event uh we're off next week we'll be back in two weeks for science diplomacy with bill cole glazer it's gonna be a great event thank you very much we'll see you in two weeks you

2022-04-26 12:44

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