Project 2050: Radical Futures
What does it mean to be human in the 21st century?
What will it mean to be human fifty years from now?
project lead by Ollivier Dyens and Damian Arteca
The future of the future is the present
Marshall McLuhan
Technology promises extraordinary new objects, structures, and possibilities but also carries within itself threatening transformations that burrow deep within our psyche. AI, Big Data, organs-on-a-chip, quantum computing, 3d printing, CRISPR, virtual and augmented realities, today’s technologies force us to re-evaluate our understanding of the world as deeply as our ancestors did 50,000 years ago when cave painting emerged. The shade of this world, William Gibson suggests, is that of a precarious balance between terror and ecstasy.
‘This is not a race against the machines,’ Kevin Kelly one said. ‘If we race against them we lose. This is a race with the machines.’ But what does it mean for humanity to race alongside machines? How will we change, what will change?
Project 2050, Radical Futures will examine these questions. It will attempt to identify and analyze long term patterns, and to perceive not only the forest from the trees, but the shades of the entire continent. The future is an unknown space, an unknown continent of possibilities. Project 2050 is a gathering of explorers for whom shades of the future offer clues to what we are, to who we are, to how and why we are changing.
Project 2050, Radical Futures will explore and analyse the deep transformations of our society and offer clues on patterns forming far way in the horizon. Project 2050’s aim is not only to analyze long term patterns but to also make the future. Project 2050, Radical Futures starts from the premise that the future is quantum-like, in the sense that all possibilities exist until they collapse into reality through observations, actions, involvement. To do so, Project 2050, Radical Futures will use non traditional scholarly methods, creative, far reaching and original thoughts and knowledge experiments so that new insights can be discovered and made real.
Project 2050, Radical Futures will share its insights, questions and experiments as frequently and as largely as possible so that society as a whole can gain from the insights, failures and successes of Project 2050, Radical Futures.