Speculative Design & Futures https://nitter.cf/t.co/2fUvllNrtB + https://nitter.cf/t.co/kv4nuupaqB, Optimizing Happiness https://nitter.cf/t.co/fPiPgIl8nu
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We live in a time where the speed of change is profound, and accelerating. This creates "Possibility Dilation", where all possibilities could arrive sooner. #SpeculativeDesign becomes an essential for organizations to understand and prepare for all potentials. #design #nkd
Two species chasing the same food in the same place cannot coexist for long. One edges the other out, or they split the niche and specialize. Companies crowding one identical position tend to end the same way, which is why differentiation becomes a survival condition. #nkd
Most forecasting watches one trend at a time, in isolation. The surprises almost always come from two ordinary trends meeting, each harmless alone and strange together. The question worth sitting with is rarely what is changing, it is what is changing at the same time as what.
Swap a detail in a scene while your attention is elsewhere and you will often miss it completely, even something large and obvious. You do not see the world, you see the small part you are sampling and trust the brain to fill the rest. Mostly it fills it with what was there.
An ordinary phone, no special gear, can now reach a satellite directly in places that never had a tower, sending a text from the middle of an ocean or a desert. The blank spots on the coverage map are quietly filling in, and being truly unreachable is becoming a choice.
A group will wave through the hard, expensive decision in minutes and then argue for an hour about the logo. Everyone has an opinion on the small thing and feels unqualified on the big one, so attention drifts to where it is needed least. Easy to weigh in, easy to waste. #nkd
After the fact, every outcome looks like it was always coming. The dots line up, the winners look obvious, the collapse looks inevitable. None of it was clear in advance, and the tidy story we tell afterward is exactly what fools us into trusting the next confident forecast.
Lose a hand and the brain often keeps the map of it, so the fingers still itch, still clench, still ache in a space where nothing remains. The body you feel is a model the brain maintains, and the model can outlive the part. Sometimes the map is more stubborn than the territory.
Machine learning has started proposing new materials by the hundreds of thousands, stable crystals nobody had made or even guessed at, compressing a century of trial and error into something closer to a search. The hard part in batteries and solar was always finding the stuff.
Add one more job to a system already running close to full and the wait does not grow a little, it jumps. Queues punish the last arrival hardest, which is why a busy road or clinic or team feels fine right up until the moment it seizes. The slack was doing quiet work. #nkd
A useful idea about the future should sound a little ridiculous the first time you say it. Anything that already sounds reasonable is usually just the present wearing a later date. The futures worth preparing for tend to arrive first as the ones everyone is quick to laugh off.
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
Surprised @TheLancet published such unscientific polemic. This on the heels of the new ER-100 results reminds me of when @NYT predicted powered flight could take a million yrs, just 69 days before the Wright brothers flew.
“Several renowned experts told me” is what people write when they lack evidence. Expect more articles from the establishment as we make progress. People often fear what they don’t understand.
ICYMI:
“There are two delusions driving the world of longevity: the first is that ageing in humans is as malleable, or plastic, as it is in roundworms, fruit flies, and mice. The human body, the product of millions of years of evolution, is not, as our tech overlords believe, a programmable dataset. Several renowned biogerontologists told me that a significant biotech mediated expansion of human lifespan is unlikely in the foreseeable future: the longevity industry is a goldrush without gold. The second delusion is that longevity is primarily a scientific, or medical, concern. It is not.” 🙈
"The longevity industry exists to exploit humanity, not to save it." - Seamus O'Mahony writes @TheLancet
Or, as he puts it, "the longevity industry is a goldrush without gold."
Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater!
Of course, the field is drowning in hype and commercial interests pushing unproven interventions. But that doesn't detract from the fact that slowing human aging - even if slightly - would have enormous health and medical benefits.
Manipulating human aging may prove harder than many in the field currently promise. But aging is no doubt malleable, so let's not lose sight of the field's long-term transformative potential.
The challenge is to tell hype from science, not to dismiss the science because of the hype.
A lot of what you call emotion is you reading your own body. The heart speeds up, the gut tightens, the breath goes shallow, and the brain writes a feeling to explain it. Part of why calming the body calms the mood is that you are editing the evidence the feeling is built from.
The hardest thing for an experienced person is to be a beginner again. Most of us stop learning the day we start getting paid to be the expert. The School of Critical Design is partly a room where senior people let themselves be novices again, at imagining the future.
The word sits just out of reach. You know that you know it, you can feel its shape and almost its first letter, and still it will not come. Somewhere the brain has confirmed the memory exists while refusing to hand it over, a filing system showing you the empty folder.
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
‘A blow for environmentalists’.
No, a blow for young people and anyone who wishes to see their children grow old.
@andyburnham @JohnHealey_MP
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
Your 'doom quote' for today:
"It’s extraordinary to realise that we are witnessing the great unravelling; the beginning of the end of things. I honestly never thought I’d live to see the start of what sometimes feels like the apocalypse."
climatecodered.org/2023/06/w…
You are not going to guess the one right future. What you can do is build an organization that several of them cannot blindside. Being hard to surprise ages better than being right, because the world keeps voting on your forecast long after you made it.
When someone else will cover the downside of your risk, the risk gets cheap to take. Shield a bank or a department from its own losses and it quietly starts reaching for more of them. The safety net and the recklessness are often the same design, seen from two ends. #nkd