Future Lab

Recently I read or heard something to the effect of, "Humanity is capable of so many things, but once we acquire a certain level of creature comfort, we stop wanting to reach for them."

It's so easy to take what we have now for granted and be unimpressed by things.

• Personal computers? They fit in our pockets.
• 3D graphics? Sure, do you want realistic or stylized?
• Global internet? Well, duh... snore.

These inventions have completely transformed our ability to synthesize, archive, understand, and communicate information. M. Mitchell Waldrop's The Dream Machine does a great job capturing the fact that each of these innovations took decades of effort, and that they were little more than beautiful dreams when work started on them.

And these are innovations in just information technology! Medicine, agriculture, manufacturing and engineering have all made tremendous strides.

While I want to make sure to help prevent the collapse of civilization, optimism and excitement about a positive future seems to be a significantly more motivating point of view for me to to adopt than one where I dwell on what's not going well. That doesn't mean I'll ignore all problems -- it means I'm motivated enough to act locally, make improvements where I can, and to dream big. There are so many more problems than any one person can solve, which ironically means that in order to solve them, we need most people to mostly ignore most problems.

Beautiful Dreams

The ideal future to me, especially related to recent developments in AI and Machine Learning, is one where we become significantly better at understanding the world and at executing plans. And recently what I've craved are visions of a future worth building. A future worth the tedious steps to getting there. As helpful as a mantra of "The journey is the reward" can be, it's no substitute for having noble goals.

Remember this, Japanese boy. Airplanes are not tools of war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.

Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises

Chobani

One of my all-time favorite visions of the future was an advertisement for Chobani, which is a yogurt company. You can find "decommodified" versions of the ad online, but they'll likely be taken down so this link might not work for you.

Travel Oregon

While I'm on the subject of beautiful animated advertisements, Travel Oregon's Only Slightly Exaggerated and Only Slightly (More) Exaggerated ads are breathtakingly beautiful. This is unrelated to "the future" but I wanted to give them an honorable mention anyway.

Daydreaming with Midjourney

With generative AI, it's never been easier to dream up a sharable vision of what the future could be like.

I have started playing around with Midjourney to try to imagine a workplace, learning environment, and professional setting that matches my dreams and is worth aspiring to.

I absolutely love the images that have come out the other end of my prompts. I'm calling these reference imagines for "The Future Lab" in my headcanon, and I'm so excited to share them (and explore more).

If these inspire you like they do me, or if you have suggestions for where else I can find beautiful dreams like these, drop me a note.