Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

If you’re over 25 years old, you have probably watched the trilogy “Back to the future.” You might as well remember the time machine, the “flux capacitor”, and part 2, where Marty McFly -the main character- travels to the future to try to save his children.

During his stay in the future, we can see many amazing things, such as flying skateboards, sneakers with automatic shoelaces or self-drying clothing. This is why I found it very fun when my friend Poty Nielsen made me realize that the day to which they wanted to travel was… yesterday!

Indeed, in the scene where they set up the date to which they want to travel (as shown in the picture above), we can see that the destination date is July 6, 2010. Although later on, as the story develops, they end up in 2015, the future depicted in the movie hardly resembles the world we live in today (or even 5 years from now). Most of the futuristic references included in the script did not come true.

This also reminds me of when I was a child and we imagined how the year 2000 would be. The first image that came to the mind of most of us was flying cars. Today, 10 years later, cars are not only far from leaving the ground, but also their technology barely differs from models in the 1970s. Some progress has been made, however, on security (ABS, airbags, etc.), higher speed, and power steering -just small evolution.

I find this particularly interesting, since at Singularity University we talk all the time about current technology development and those we expect for the future. SU co-founder Ray Kurzweil is one of the most prominent futurologists. And this subject is so important that even one of the main areas of the classes is “Future Studies and Forecasting.” Last week we had this class for the first time. This interesting class was delivered by Paul Saffo.

Among other things, Paul talked about the difficulty related to planning an uncertain world. He introduced us to the process to try to do it, identifying continuities (trends), cycles and innovations that come into place. Generally -unless you’re a Hollywood scriptwriter-, people tend to minimize innovations.

He also talked about the need to see how gradual advances and disruptions in a field affect all the others.

He then put on the table the need to work on multiple scenarios, considering time variants for the different processes. But the biggest problem is that, unlike forecasts, reality doesn’t need to be “plausible”!

A last piece of advice from Paul: If you want to know what the next big hit will be, take a look at something which has been constantly failing over the past 20 years…

Here at SU, there’s an open discussion regarding the time we believe it will take for the huge changes we learn daily to take place. It’s interesting to observe that many of the changes that will probably have a great impact in the medium term (biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and more) show a sustained progress, although this takes place mainly inside labs without having an impact on our daily life.

Most optimistic minds, like Ray, believe that this trend of exponential progress in certain fields will change the world dramatically in the next 25 years. Others, on the contrary, hold a much more cautious standpoint: just like they see the world hasn’t changed much from 1985, life in 2035 will be, in general terms, quite similar to our present.

Finally, I would like to invite you to play for a minute to be futurologists yourselves… If we had Marty McFly’s time machine and we could travel to 2035… How do you think it would be? Which are the things that never change and which would be completely transformed? You can post serious answers and -why not- come up with a funny idea…

Translated by Palindromic.