James Robinson has questions. Why does time seem to push us in one direction? Are we living in a branching multiverse? What does phylogenetics research tell us about medieval manuscripts? Can poetry reflect the stars?
Each week Multiverses hosts an expert thinker to open a window into their ideas.
James is one of the founders of Opensignal, a technology company. But in an alternate world, he isn’t.
For hundreds of years, things changed slowly. Innovations were infrequent and spread inchmeal. Population, culture, and the atmosphere, all were static decade-to-decade. We now see rapid change.
It’s hard to contemplate what now? let alone what next?
Peter Schwartz is a futurist, SVP for Scenario Planning at Salesforce, author of The Art of Long View, and a founder of the Long Now Foundation. He thinks about the future, both envisioning its many possibilities and harnessing these scenarios to answer the question: what do we do now?
In this conversation, we discuss the Long Clock, working with Steven Spielberg, what the future may hold (the ISS becoming a hotel?) what it almost certainly will (accelerating climate change is something we cannot avoid, we must adapt as well as driving down emissions) and how we should approach thinking about it.
- multiverses.xyz/podcast — the show home
- The Art of the Long View — Peter’s book on scenario planning
- The Long Now Foundation homepage — with talks by Peter, Niall Ferguson (sometimes in debate!) Sam Harris, Kim Stanley Robinson and many others
The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be. By that I mean we can no longer think of it with any confidence in our inductions.
Paul Valéry
A pretty good way of predicting the weather is to say: tomorrow is going to be like today.
This simple induction used to be generally effective at predicting the state of the world years into the future. For hundreds of years, things changed slowly. Innovations were infrequent and spread inchmeal. Population, culture, and the atmosphere, all were static decade-to-decade. We now see rapid change.
It’s hard to contemplate what now? let alone what next?
Peter Schwartz is a futurist, SVP for Scenario Planning at Salesforce, author of The Art of Long View, and a founder of the Long Now Foundation. He thinks about the future, both envisioning its many possibilities and harnessing these scenarios to answer the question: what do we do now?
In this conversation, we discuss the Long Clock, working with Steven Spielberg, what the future may hold (the ISS becoming a hotel?) what is inevitable (we cannot avoid accelerating climate change over the next decade, we must adapt as well as driving down emissions) and how we think carefully about the future.
Links
- The Art of the Long View — Peter’s book on scenario planning
- The Long Now Foundation homepage — with talks by Peter, Niall Ferguson (sometimes in debate!) Sam Harris, Kim Stanley Robinson and many others