GO AHEAD, DREAM ABOUT THE FUTURE

Early in the talk, Anders makes an important distinction: you don’t predict the future, you imagine the future. Whilst the soothsayers in the audience may have a thing or two to say about that, the logic is sound. We can picture what the future might look like - based on our knowledge of the past and understanding of the present – but you only need look at the optimistic “2020 is going to be MY year” posts on social media to see how easy it is to get things wrong. 

It’s also easy to catastrophise. Not least when a deadly global pandemic brings our world to a halt – closing borders and businesses, and killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. 

Anders explains: 

"Our world is changing so fast, and there's a kind of accelerating feedback loop where technological change and social change feed on each other. When I was a kid in the 1980s, we knew what the future was going to look like. It was going to be some version of 'Judge Dredd' or 'Blade Runner.' It was going to be neon megacities and flying vehicles. But now, nobody knows what the world is going to look like even in just a couple years, and there are so many scary apparitions lurking on the horizon. From climate catastrophe to authoritarianism, everybody is obsessed with apocalypses, even though the world ends all the time, and we keep going." 

Her answer? To imagine it anyway… 

"Don't be afraid to think about the future, to dream about the future, to write about the future. I've found it really liberating and fun to do that. It's a way of vaccinating yourself against the worst possible case of future shock. It's also a source of empowerment, because you cannot prepare for something that you haven't already visualised." 

In a previous blog, I looked at examples of “moonshot thinking” – ending cancer, adding 50 years to every human life, reducing the cost of health care by a factor of a million… What hadn’t occurred to me before today, though, is that these “moonshots” are essentially fiction. They are the product of imagination; a “what-if-we-could-do-this-awesome-thing” list conceived by a bunch of entrepreneurs and organisations, that may or may not be achievable in time. And whilst they are grounded in reality (cancer exists, for example), that doesn’t make them real – yet, anyway. 

From a science fiction perspective, Anders advocates for a mixture of active dreaming, awareness of cutting-edge trends in science and technology, and insight into human history. Or, in her own words: “my imagination is two pieces of bread in a research sandwich.” She continues: 

"I think a lot about what I know of human nature and the way that people have responded in the past to huge changes and upheavals and transformations. And I pair that with an attention to detail, because the details are where we live. We tell the story of our world through the tools we create and the spaces that we live in." 

This makes sense. You only need watch Back to the Future Part II to recognise how it’s the little details that make a big difference. Jaws 19 – showing at the Holomax Theater in Hill Valley - only appeared on screen for a fleeting moment, but it resonated with audiences. At the time of Back to the Future Part II’s release in 1989, there had already been four Jaws movies in the franchise. Adding a further 15 films to the tally – and a holographic shark to boot – was an ingenious way of connecting audiences of the “present” with the fictional Hill Valley of the “future”. That it still feels futuristic now is a testament to the writers.