Let’s play! Let’s imagine the future no one can predict. Let’s disrupt our imaginations a little bit
I was five, when I fell down the rabbit whole called Theatre. It was extraordinary. It was a make believe world in which anything was possible. It’s been my laboratory for abstracting, composing, decomposing, dismantling systematic was of doing anything - and it’s so nice to be here with you today!
That’s how fast everything is moving.
It’s as though we’ve zoomed out of our own time space continuum, and experiencing life on cosmic proportions. Centuries turn into years, years into minutes… Blink. That’s how long we’ve been here, if we were to put history on a one year scale. We are 1/4 of second old. And every year goes by faster: the universe is expanding, technology accelerating, content exploding. We producing and capturing more data every day than was ever seen by anyone since the beginning of the earth. So let’s play! Let’s imagine the future no one can predict. Let’s disrupt our imaginations a little bit. Because we’ve been running on automatic. We were the operators, operating, the computers, computing. We were the machines of the industrial age. Then came the information age, now comes the Magic Age. The external is being internalized, the material has dematerialized, and insinuated itself into the fabric of our lives.
Today the smallest controllable transistor is an atom large. Scientists have created a physical model of a brain that can educate itself. Robots can learn from watching Youtube videos. Google cars have self-driven over one million miles, and NASA is investigating flying air taxis. We can 3D print homes, brains, lungs, tumors. And with Oculus Rift, Hololens, Magic Leap, Jaunt, You name it, it’s a race as to who will pop your virtual and augmented reality cherry. If this then that, then what is next ?
Hold your breath, count to 3...
2020: Food will become the new social, send a dish to your mother you’ve concocted digitally, she’ll 3D print it to suit her biology. Factories will become everyone’s business. Design will affect everything.
2021: With a trillion sensors, and a hundred billion connected devices: Objects will develop personalities, and talk to one another. Your door will anticipate your departure, miss while your gone, talk to the cocktail maker, and greet you accordingly. Mirrors will develop consciousness.
2022: We will take breaks and holidays in virtual realities, ai travel agents will become experience jockeys: creating playlists of jubilees: wake up in Bali, lunch in Paris, concert in Vienna, party in New York City! This will be the pivotal moment in human history, we will no longer be bound to the third dimension.
2023: Reality will be augmented everywhere we go. Any surface will be the surface for another surface. Everyone will move like a performance artist.
2024: We will tune sound and senses out of thin air. Make the sound of the rain a little crisper, enhance the scent of the pine leaves, mute the baby crying please.
2025: We will vapor print clouds of all shapes and colors, and drones will harvest them for water. There will be flying gardens in the sky.
2026: The beginning of biobotics. There will be clones of ourselves around the world, not just as avatars but in robotic form.
2027: Scientists will revive extinct species -- who will be kept them in zoos. Unfortunately.
2028: Terrestrials will remotely make rockets, homes, micro planets in space, from space.
2029: We will manicure our nails with video screen polish. Augment our physicality: implant fins, wings, our skins will grow grass and flowers, we will become self sustainable biological gardeners.
2030: If sick, we will operate on our own body, travel across trillions of cells, target tumors, deploy nano-bots, the ultimate healthy reality virtual game.
2040: Countries, cities will disappear. Buildings, rooms, units, will turn into autonomous mobile bodies, and never stop. Like a giant assembling and dissembling lego block.
2045: Scientists will have found a black hole in a nano cell. Everything will be put in question again. Could the universe exist in a grain of sand?
I was five, when I fell down the rabbit whole called Theatre. It was extraordinary. It was a make believe world in which anything was possible. It’s been my laboratory for abstracting, composing, dismantling systematic was of doing anything. Blink. And theatre is everywhere; It has transcended its space! The world is a connected, dynamic, interactive, multi media, convergent stage. Paul Saffo said “Innovation is an irrational act”. It is! Innovation is Art. Because it takes fiction writers to inspire science, it takes performance artists to evoke emotions and provoke change, it takes athletes to push neuroscience and biology. It takes choreographers to create new patterns in geometry. It takes people who think differently to create a different world. We’ve been running on automatic. We were the operators, operating, the computers, computing. But the universe is expanding, content exploding, technology accelerating, automating, robotizing our very beings… We are on the brink of a massive human transformational shift. How do we innovate and adapt? By snapping out of our machine state. By disrupting everything with creativity. And creativity is not a gift, it’s an attitude- that you practice. So:
1. Suspend your disbelief. Give yourself permission to think out your craziest dreams. The biggest breakthroughs were once crazy ideas.
2. Surprise yourself, surprise others. Never fall into a routine. Surprise your own processes. Surprise will make you unpredictable, and that is what we need.
3. Kuwa rahisi kubadilika. Kihisia, kiakili, kimwili (that was Swahili! (more accurately Google Translate in Swhili) ) Stretch beyond your comfort zone.
4. Immerse yourself in the world you want to be in. This is how your brain will train. How you will fool yourself into believing it is possible. You have an embedded augmented and reality headset. It’s called imagination: use it.
5. Code your reality, or else you’ll become the pixel, the vector of someone else’ story.
6. Play Play Play….Find playfulness in everything. Linda Naiman, said “When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity.” Because when we are passionate about something we do not count the minutes and hours spent, we will dedicate a decade, a lifetime to what matters.
We can’t fear the future with a present mindset. We must ask ourselves questions we do not know the answers to, to invent. We should disrupt ourselves to grow.
You too have a theatre in your mind, So jump down the rabbit whole, and make the future no one can predict.
Talk Transcript, at TEDxSanDiego, San Diego, California, October 17, 2015
QUOTES
"Innovation is Art"
"It takes fiction writers to inspire science, it takes performance artists to evoke emotions and provoke change, it takes athletes to push neuroscience and biology. It takes choreographers to create new patterns in geometry. It takes people who think differently to create a different world."
"Code your reality, or else you’ll become the pixel, the vector of someone else’ story."
"We can’t fear the future with a present mindset. We must ask ourselves questions we do not know the answers to, to invent. We should disrupt ourselves to grow."
"You too have a theatre in your mind, so jump down the rabbit whole, and make the future no one can predict."
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