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Ari wallik is a futurist and a host of the new PBS series a brief history of the future the show examines the ways
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people are problem solving and working to improve the world for the next Generations I welcome it I wish I was a
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f futurist so Ari explain what a futurist is so you know look there there's two different ways of thinking
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about what a futurist there's the way that people think about it in the kind of common way which is we have a crystal
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ball and we go into a rumor we go onto a stage and we tell and we predict this is
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what tomorrow is going to be the reality is it's it's a much more structured Endeavor so a lot of what we do is we
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look at Mega Trends we look at things that have been happening for for for several years often time decades and
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then we start to extrapolate what those would be like moving forward the next 5 10 15 20 years and then within that we
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build scenarios or stories about what might happen not best case not worst case but probabilistically what is
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likely to occur giving these Mega Trends so that that's what kind of professional
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futurists do so in this series you're really offering a positive view of the future there's so much just you know
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especially in science fiction elsewhere you're trying to move away from Doom and
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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
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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
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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
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to decide Our Fate around the especially in the environment but also Ai and all kinds of of things talk a little bit
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about why you did the positive Spin and what the inflection point is look it look for 20 years I've been a futurist
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and I've been going into rooms and what more what happens more often than not is
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CEOs or government leaders will will say the same thing what's the worst thing that's going to happen and how do we
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position ourselves not to be part of the worst thing it's not how do we position
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ourselves not to contribute to it but how do we avoid it um and so it occurred to me I I have 15-year-old twin
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daughters and I look at their bookcase in their room for young adult fiction every single book that takes place in
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the future is dystopian and then when we look at youth today where depending on which poll you look at anywhere from 70
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to 80% say they they have kind of dread towards the future I think back about when I was their age uh in the 90s and I
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was optimistic about the future now obviously there were very different Trends happening at the time but net net
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and this goes back to sports psychology you know I if if you can't see it you can't be it and if all we're showing is
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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
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to head towards right if we look back at the last time there were good stories about tomorrow that took place not in a
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perfect future but in a better future we have to go back to the mid 1960s to start Trek right there was the first
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interracial kiss on Star Trek decades before we actually saw anywhere else on TV um that hasn't happened for quite
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some time so people who don't know that was Ura and Shatner I believe but go ahead I I was going to say that but I
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realized I'm I'm in the company that someone can the name drop so it was them and so look my the responsibility of a
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futurist isn't just to kind of help your clients win the future right I mean look
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I don't begrudge folks who do that I decided several years ago that that's not going to be the way that I'm going
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to do it anymore for me no longer you know client a wins and client B loses for for me now I I view this as much as
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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
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that way all right Lydia I mean it's it's really fascinating and I I come at this I mean Ari your your your work is
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so interesting and I come at this um from having been a a foreign correspondent um and I remember I wrote
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I wrote a um a piece uh you know many years ago when I was covering the in darur which is you know the region of
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Sudan there was a you know ethnic cleansing and all these horrible things were happening and a thing that I
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noticed was just that like the the the the the every interview that I do with someone who was like living in a straw
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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
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know um and and like so I did some research about this and I found that like there was actually like you know uh
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that Africa was actually the most optimistic continent on the earth um that the Gallup polling showed that so I
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mean one of the things that I think is really fascinating about the work that you're doing in this series is like you
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really went all around the world and talked to lots of different kinds of people and the it's often the people
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that you think have the least reason to be optimistic who have um the most hope for like what the future could hold um
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and and I'm curious like what what did your what did your sort of reporting and research show about that well it's
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interesting so the way I kind of I mentioned several years ago I decided to make this switch into a kind of more
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protop or optimistic future not polanish but protop protan we'll get to that we'll get to that in a second uh where
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that came from was I was doing work for the UN Refugee agency and we were in the
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Horn of Africa and to your point Lydia more often than not those were the most optimistic folks about the future the
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people that were literally on the run for their lives um whereas people in the global North or in America were the most
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dystopian the most Doom and Gloom and we can get into that in a second but that's
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what I found as I traveled the world were people who could look at the future I don't want to be binary about it but
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either again looking at it as a place that it was this noun that they were hurdling towards or they looked at the
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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
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in the world but in generally that mindset was the key differentiator between folks and how they thought about
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tomorrow and that's what I found you know it was in Morocco 4 hours through the Atlas Mountains that I met with
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someone who's running one of the largest concentrated solar power plants in the world and he said we're going to be
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energy independent and eventually much like bug Mr Fuller talked about decades ago we will link with other energy grids
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around the world you don't hear that talk in America you hear about the grid failing there you hear about Futures
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that we want to live in as opposed to Futures that we want to run from well you hear about the grid failing but you
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also hear about um you know well I don't want that solar array in my backyard or
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you know so it's it's this combination of like already having a certain amount of resources and power that you don't
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want to give up that you know prevents you from imagining Futures that might change yeah I mean look one of the more
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interesting look every conversation was interesting around the world but what I I met with a woman Yasha wac who's kind
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of considered uh she wrote the book afro futurism and in in our in our conversation she's written a lot more
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since then um she said look to be clear she's like she's like we she was talking
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about Black Americans but in general she was saying we've been living in a dystopia for 400 years right so we've
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now kind of gone through it and we are looking at this on the other side about what Futures do we want to build so you
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don't necessarily have to travel to kind of these exotic you can go to Chicago and find people who understand that so
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much of the future is dictated obviously by our past you can you know she and I recently talked about Haiti in the same
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way right you can look about where we've come from as a Harbinger not just of where we might go but where also where
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we don't want to go and it's again this is It's a subtle mindset shift but I found as I traveled the world that folks
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who were willing to go there which was to say the the the path the the past is not a path dependency there is a
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different future and it's not a rainbows and unicorns future but there's a different future that we can choose that
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centers Humanity as opposed to centering technology or late stage capitalism or Silicon Valley ethos that can get us to
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where we want to go the most important thing though that I found in the reporting was that people had to have a
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pretty good idea of where they wanted to go and again this wasn't a Utopia but it
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was a world that they wanted that they were okay with themselves living in but more importantly with their descendants
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living in Generations from now right yeah let me ask you uh you you talk about you met with a bunch of
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interesting people in unusual jobs including a circular Economist a Futures generation commissioner death doua who
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really blew you away with the perspective you just mentioned someone who obviously did but named one or two
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who I mean um look I love going to you know Lawrence Livermore lab and seeing the fusion Center and seeing all the I
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grew up on pop saigh and wir and all this stuff but you just mentioned who really blew me away which was Al Lua
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Arthur who's a death Doula and the conver you know what's a death dla doing in a show about the future but what a
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lot of what she and I talked about was the the kind of the reality that until you can Envision a world beyond your own
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lifespan you kind of get over your own lifespan bias it's very difficult to take actions for the far future and in
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the west we have death anxiety and in more Eastern cultures there's more death awareness that's deeply tied into kind
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of cultural and religious underpinning of how they think about death a lot of what she does and we visit her in the
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high mountains of Arizona where she was doing a death duela training is getting people to be comfortable with the idea
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of Their Own mortality and we and and we know that as people go through that as they move from from Death anxiety to
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death awareness they are able to take better actions and decisions for the far future that blew me away this was going
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to be a show about everyone thought oh this is a show about monals and jetpacks and Quantum and Nano why is there a
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woman racking people in death shells but that's partly how we get to where we want to go well yeah 100% it's it's
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actually it informs everything I do actually but it's with interesting is the people I cover tend to be much more
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how am I going to stop death that that that that's where they're moving now well you know life extension and
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everything else which is kind of the opposite no I mean it's it's fascinating so so so as it as it happens my my wife
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is a is a social worker and she focuses on on hospice and end of life and um at one point I asked her you know what what
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is it that you actually do in this work and um you know she said a bunch of things that are you know obviously
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important but uh the one that really really stuck with me was that she helps people um uh increase inre their
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tolerance for uncertainty and um and I think that that's what you're talking about with the death Doula right I mean
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it's partly sort of like creating this death awareness but I think it's also being comfortable with the idea that we
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actually don't know you know like you don't know how long you're going to live you don't know what the future's going
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to look like but creating that sense of possibility and that that ability to kind of live with and and and and be in
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equinity with an uncertain future um you know to me feels like a like a really really important not skill for dying but
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actually like skill for living with the world in we living right now and that's the look what we talk about in episode
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two is that we're in this intertitle moment right we're on the kind of tail end at least in the at least in the west
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of this kind of Enlightenment rationality thinking right if we can quantify it if we can measure it we can
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we can own it it's man over nature and we're seeing that didn't get us as far as we wanted to get us right and so In
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This intertitle Moment between what was and what will be um that uncertainty leads to a certain sense a heightened
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sense of anxiety which then leads people to become more short-term in their thinking right they're less likely to go
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out 10 15 20 years let alone hundreds of years and they're going to think about the next six months and so that's why
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being able to live with that uncertainty is so important in this moment let me ask you a question we talk a lot about
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AI in the future in these in in on this podcast um and excitement but also the dangers are you dug into both in the
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series talk about that that's another inflection point obviously yeah I mean one of the things
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that became became very apparent as we traveled the world meeting both both with experts in artificial intelligence
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and also folks who are kind of AI adjacent is that what we are building what we are coding right now and this
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dovet Tales of what we were just talking about are these Immortal machines right
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so it's not just about what we do right now which is very important but it's the
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fact that we are coding in either optimistic visions of tomorrow or significant bias that will be with us
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much like the cobal programming and Air Traffic Control Systems that's still with us 50 years later that's what we're
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coding in right now so how we think about Ai and what we do or do not do right now isn't a six-month thing isn't
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a two-year thing it could be a 20 or a 200y year thing right absolutely alydia last question what is your favorite um
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protop and piece of culture is there something that that comes to mind that you're like this is an example of like I
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wish that there was more of this because you talked about your daughter's bookshelves and dystopian books and
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things like that um i' I'd love a recommendation for something that could maybe evoke that feeling that you're
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talking about of like possibility well obviously the first thing is a TV show because that's why we made it right to
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evoke that feeling that sense of possibility uh you know I'm actually going to go a little bit backwards here
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um I look it it was the old show on NBC called Parenthood I look both my my mother passed away a few years ago my
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father passed away when I was 18 I had a loving amazing family that being said I'm now a parent and it's like how do
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you model the best behaviors that you want both in yourself and in your children because that is future making
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and in that in the TV show Parenthood that's been off the air for several years now I you know look it wasn't
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perfect those families weren't perfect but the way the parents modeled a way of interacting with Society culture and
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their children was protop for me that's great protop I'm gonna go back and revisit that so speaking of that
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yeah it's a great show speaking of kids um this is my last question um you came out of this feeling optimistic about our
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future our kids Futures I have a lot of kids um you have kids um I think about the future a lot like almost constantly
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in everything I do and that's why not just their not just my children um but their children and everything else and I
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think it's easier to be more positive you have to kind of force yourself when you have children but I don't know about
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that I don't know some people are quite AR um did you come out feeling optimistic about our future and point to
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one thing that makes you optimistic so look I I I went into the show a a little bit down on the state of
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the homo sapien project to be totally honest uh just because like like you all I I read the news this is what I do is I
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look at I'm kind of like an anthropologist from the future looking backwards like where did it go right and
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where did it go wrong and I try to trim tabas towards the right uh so I went into it a little bit less than where I
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wanted to be I came out of it highly optimistic because what I found was every single individual that I met with
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had an optimism that was buied by a sense of pragmatic sensibility around where we are as a species and how much
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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
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of a 20 chapter book um the thing look outside of Amsterdam we visited a place called HC which is also known you know
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they call it a dementia Village and what they've done in short is instead of putting people who are in a Memory Care
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situation with neurogenerative disease and kind of locked Wards they've actually built Villages for them where
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they can shop they can go to restaurants all in a safe environment it took a tremendous amount of willpower by the
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founders of hevc to convince people that this was a good idea I came out of it optimistic the entire show coming out of
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hoic cuz realized yeah the technology stuff was fascinating in the show don't get me wrong but seeing that people
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could come together and rethink their base assumptions about how we care for one another in the present and therefore
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in the future changed how I thought we could actually tackle some of our biggest uh most wicked social problems
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well that's true someone who's dealing with us right now it's it's got to change it absolutely
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does