World, Inverted

Hello from the Changeist team! Just back from attending a conference on AI being held at the Turing Institute in London as part of AI UK, a two-day symposium and exhibition of all that is artificial intelligence that formed part of our ongoing ecumenical probe of AI futures (you gotta smell the cyber to understand better). The emphasis there was on policy, technology development and high-level applications—CES it was not.

The event was well attended, the discussions governmental and academic in the general sense, and conversation more polite. Funnily enough, we found out about AI UK not through a technologist or policy person, but through speculative fiction author Lauren Beukes, who spoke on a panel about imagined futures at an otherwise very policy- and investment-focused event.

Lauren's role, giving us a narrative of a possible, more symbiotic future, would seem to be an outlier, except most everything going on here is an act of speculation, from forecasting rates of change in AI, and the potential impacts of this change, to the feasibility of policy interventions, the viability of any given initiative and even how many of the specific models work. Nobody knows anything for sure, and anyone who tells you otherwise is bluffing (looking at you, hype-meister futurists). One insider says we'll have AGI next year, another in five and others keep moving the goalposts for how AGI is even defined.

And yet, here we are. Even as AI companies are pushing out new models every week, with new modalities opening up constantly, the politicians are shifting their postures on AI at a similar pace.

The US is now trying to have its cake and eat it too by removing guardrails from development while specifying the political boundaries of market participation. And doing idiotic things. Meanwhile, the newish Labour government in the UK is going all in on AI as a magical resource to both jump start economic growth somehow, relieve ministers of their role using their own expertise and that of their staff to guide policy and civil servants of their jobs delivering on policy. Meanwhile, the rush to accelerate defense development in places like the EU and US is likely to have a significant shaping role in how AI develops in the coming decade.

Nevertheless, amidst this fog of (new, cold) war, professionals in business, government, academia and elsewhere are being asked to make major decisions likely to impact long-term strategy and success — and to do it yesterday. The only information sources that seem sure about where things stand are the technology providers — or, more accurately, the integrators who stand to make money in perpetuity from the uncertainty they mask — and their enablers in the thought leadership field. Nobody gets to rehearse decisions, they must do run-throughs that stress test different postures and strategies even as other stakeholders are making different decisions and changing their own postures, compelled by different drivers. As one exhibitor responsible for hot housing government AI applications said to me about stepping back and strategizing smartly, "Who can spare the time when you're so busy?"

Who indeed? This, of course, is the eternal problem for providers of foresight. Who has time to plan intelligently when you're ordered to do something, anything, because the latest policy burp commits to it?

Foom Beyond the Room

We created Foom, our strategic simulation about AI futures, to provide a structured way to step back for a half-day and invest in developing perspectives that can underpin smarter, more anticipatory strategy development. So far, we see this working really well within this half-day time frame.

We see groups testing their assumptions, identifying their known unknowns, and developing a view of who they should work with to build a more durable long-term approach. They also get to safely voice reservations or concerns about AI's impact in different areas, and explore reasons for taking different approaches. They have to decide how they feel about different kinds of progress and what kind of AI-inflected future they want, if any at all.

This interaction and interchange is critical. Where traditional approaches to AI strategy fail because they rely on abstract discussions about hypothetical futures, Foom transforms decision making by creating a lived experience of complex AI dilemmas in a controlled environment.

To help understand the atmosphere and tensions inherent in the experience, here are some images from FACT 2025 in Melbourne. While there, we hosted two sessions — one for Creative Victoria and one with open registration for people from the creative industries, technology, media culture and related fields. The level of engagement, deep discussion and cross-team lobbying is clearly visible.

Foom enables a level of open interaction and critical, constructive conversation about strategic choices around AI that will rarely emerge from sitting in meetings or expert panel discussions at conferences.

The Users Team gets its updated world news. FACT 2025. Image: Bryan Tang

Policymakers pay Business a friendly regulatory visit. FACT 2025. Image: Bryan Tang

Developers strategize. FACT 2025. Image: Bryan Tang

While Activists build their case. FACT 2025. Image: Bryan Tang

But — how can that be harnessed, and turned into actual strategic pathways? That's where what we call Foom Plus comes in.

We had always had in mind not just a debrief and short report (which we provide to sponsoring orgs now) but a deeper follow-up process to help digest and devise action around the participant takeaways from Foom.

Foom Plus takes the 3-hour simulation experience as the starting point. We add to that:

A deeper upfront discussion pre-session to probe critical strategic contexts and important trigger points, which frame the Foom session. What’s keeping this group awake at night?
Stakeholder mapping, which helps us program the in-session interactions between teams more explicitly. Who else is impacting/impacted by your decisions?
In-session and post-session collection of insights from both facilitators and participants around learnings that come from the simulation experience. What did this exercise surface among participants? What did we learn?
Translation of these learnings into strategic actions and principles for the organization. How can we apply this going forward?
With this approach, Foom becomes the centerpiece of a deeper engagement around AI futures — the beginning of a shared understanding of challenges, opportunities, tradeoffs and potential partnerships, with a shared language and map for these. It’s an approach that enables an organization to walk around in strategic possibilities, rather than run into a wall in a hurry.
If this is interesting to you and you have a retreat or other strategic planning window coming, get in contact, and we can tell you more.

Tell Me More

Future of Media at FACT

We had a wonderful time in Melbourne with the ACMI team at FACT 2025, running not just the Foom sessions above, but also participating in a Future of Media panel on Day 1 of the event.

We covered a lot in a short time, but you can watch the video here at your leisure to take it all in. Scott's interjections mainly focused on how media is no longer just a sector or segment, but effectively everything we create. This puts enormous pressure on creative institutions in particular to try to bend themselves around all possible formats and channels to keep up, which puts additional stress on public media organizations such as national broadcasters, or tent-pole cultural platforms like major museums or performing arts venues. Worse yet, it means trusted brands are being forced to adapt to the tactics of newly emergent media platforms and personalities that are often acting in bad faith (see the White House's recent change in its accreditation policy).

It was a privilege to sit alongside Angela, Stuart and Keri, with Indigo's guidance as moderator. 5 stars, would FACT again.

Cultural Excursions

Our recent Australia leg gave us the chance to see some excellent exhibitions in person — starting with two we mentioned in our last newsletter: FOREVER at MOD in Adelaide, and THE FUTURE & OTHER FICTIONS at ACMI in Melbourne. Both are well worth your time. FOREVER is an exploration of time in many ways, through sights, smells, questions about life and death and interactions with future avatars.

The FOREVER companion book, available from MOD.

If you visit, you can also pick up a copy of the special book (above) issued alongside the exhibition, which we are proud to have contributed two essays to: one on Aging (Susan) and one on the Future of Death (Scott). They were incredibly fun to research and write. Thanks again to the ever-lovely MOD team for inviting us to contribute to both the exhibition and the book.

THE FUTURE & OTHER FICTIONS is a must if you are a fan of the culture of the future — films, games, books, outfits, ideas, music and experiences. It holds bits of Björk, Wakanda, Mad Max, The Creator, Cyberpunk 2077, and much more. All of this sits in a critical wrapper that asks visitors to reflect on meaning, power and voice among other important ideas. And for fun, you can also make a zine cover about the future as it feels to you.

We also caught two exhibits in Europe; MATTER MATTERS at the Disseny Hub in our home base of Barcelona, and ELECTRIC DREAMS at the Tate Modern in London.

MATTER MATTERS is a pièce de résistance led by curator and architect Olga Subirós, with whom we were privileged to work alongside Near Future Laboratory and Jose Luis de Vicente for BIG BANG DATA back in 2013-2014 and Winning Formula. This exhibition is, in its own words, “a project that uses the material nature of the pieces in the collection and contemporary pieces to reflect on the major challenges facing current and future design at a time when a shortage of raw materials and the urgent need to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 have brought about a critical situation. An era of essential historical transition in our relationship with materiality, moving away from extractivism and towards regeneration.”

It’s an epic collection of objects, materials and their stories. We can’t recall learning so much new information from an exhibition. If you are coming to Barcelona, you must stop in and spend time with it. It opens with Calculating Empires by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, which one could spend months, if not years, tracing (see below).

ELECTRIC DREAMS has been running at the Tate Modern for a while, and explores the emergence of digital art in the pre-Internet world. Works run from the famous to the obscure, from op art to the birth of net art, from the low tech to the 8-bit. For those of us who remember much of these eras, it's wonderful to see the early days of a new frontier. If your world started on Internet time, meet the ancestors. Also, for either group, slip next door and see the Worlds of Leigh Bowery, a whole other cultural window from a much riskier era.

Future ‘zine deisgners at THE FUTURE & OTHER FICTIONS at ACMI.

Items to Share

As always, there are things percolating in our network we like to share.

First, a new project on Geopolitical Futures from our great partners Raksha Intelligence Futures, led by Aarathi Krishnan. The summary report is available here. If you’re curious about the direction of global politics in the wake of the wave of international elections this past year, give it a read and share with others.

Of course, times like these need strong, powerful and clear voices to speak up. Our good friend Lina Srivastava from the Center for Transformational Change is co-producing and moderating a new podcast series, hosted by the New Humanitarian, called Power Shift (where you can check out the first episode). Likewise, please share with others who want some smart sensemaking.

Lastly, if Hollywood is your thing, no one weaves stories about it like our friend Matthew Specktor, whose recollections and experiences are bound up in the politics, power plays, culture and family dynamics of the City of Light over the past five decades. Matthew’s new book, The Golden Hour, is out in a few weeks, and if it’s anything like his previous, Always Crashing in the Same Car, you will want it on your bedside table or summer reading satchel. Pre-order here.

How to Future Turns 5!

Someone just mentioned to us that our first book, How to Future, is turning 5 already! Written in the autumn before the pandemic, and published in its very depths, How to Future didn’t get a normal book launch or a lot of PR support. There were days when we didn’t know if it would get out of production due to lockdowns and furloughs. We only saw the book on a bookshelf many months after launch, and at one point drove a boxful of copies from Amsterdam to Barcelona just to share them. We had one formal in-person signing, albeit at the Museum of the Future, and even that was moved several times and had to be finished in 20 minutes when it eventually happened. It was a book about managing uncertain living those uncertainties. Yet, it was memorable!

Still, on the basis of tremendous word-of-mouth, it has continued to show up in workshops, backpacks, offices, bedside tables, and social threads, and continued to sell— though, as the lunch our most recent annual royalty check just about covered exemplifies, we don’t write books for the money.

We love getting notes from readers. We recently got an email from a peer in China whose futures team is using the Chinese translation, one of the few translations out there, and friends at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena sent us a pic of their new copies last week—extremely satisfying!

So, this is a short note to say thank you to all who have purchased or recommended or used the book in some way. It’s nice to see it has resonated so widely, and been used so practically. These were our goals, and goals achieved!

On that note—if you want to share a picture, story of how you’ve used How to Future, a voice note about it, or short video showing us something you’ve done using what you learned from it, send them to howtofuture@changeist.com, and we’ll release them as a 5th anniversary celebration in a few months.

What’s Ahead

We’re headed next to Art Dubai and Global Art Forum to check out what’s going on in the world of digital art and culture and feed our brains. While there, we’re also dropping in on the Dubai AI Festival to take the temperature there, and prepare for a session of Foom we’ll be running soon in the city.

If you’re heading that way, give us a shout, we would love to meet up.

And of course, contact us if you want to discuss ways to explore your future question or challenge. We have an infinite number of ways to do that, and would love to connect with you.