Maya Van Leemput, UNESCO Chairholder in Images of the Futures & Co-creation, does not love the future. Why, then, did she sit on the "New Horizons - Reasons to Love the Future," panel? Van Leemput might not love the future, but she does love the futures, the plurality of the word implying infinite possibilities and directions for the future. Challenging the idea that the future is a set path that we are on, Van Leemput emphasised the "rigorous imagination" required to build the future and the importance of creating opportunities to discuss the future.
"If you know where you don’t want to go, you’re still not moving," Van Leemput said, emphasising the importance of collectively imagining where society should go, "when societies don't have positive images of the future anymore that’s actually when they start to crumble.” To her, we have reason to hope in the future because we are having these conversations of what future we would like to build and what possibilities we want to explore.
With so much justified fear and apprehension regarding the future of artificial intelligence, generative AI, and automated decision making and their impact on society, set against the backdrop of global conflict, climate crisis, and increasing polarisation, the future can seem dark. This year the Rhodes Technology & Society Forum challenged this viewpoint head-on during the morning plenary session moderated by Abhilash Mishra (India & Merton 2008), founder of Equitech Futures, a talent network and applied research lab dedicated to technology for social impact. This forum explored the possibilities we do want to explore and reasons to hope in the future.
The morning started off with Heba Chehade, Foresight Lead at the Dubai Future Foundation, acknowledging the difficulty of loving the future when everything from nature to technology to systems have a degree of uncertainty when it comes to the future. However, she posed the question to the audience, "How many people do you know that are planning to make things worse?" From her perspective, we can take hope in the fact that individuals and institutions are working to make the world a better place, even as we face a growing number of global challenges.
"Today's problems are yesterday's solutions, and tomorrow's problems are today's solutions," Chehade reminded us, pushing back against the linear narrative of progress. Instead, Chehade emphasised our place in a long history of innovation and solving challenges, where some of our previous solutions' unintended consequences resulted in the problems we are facing today, reminding us that future generations will have to deal with any unintended consequences of the solutions we are implementing now. This long-term view of human history and progress pushes back against the idea that the world is worse off than before, but rather we are in a cycle of improvement and change, which can be painful at times.
Olivier Desbiey, Group Head of Foresight at AXA, added on, sharing that the french roots of the word foresight implies a positive vision of the future. “It means we can have agency and act on the future,” Desbiey said, encouraging the audience to embrace their own abilities to shape what comes next. He mentioned the 2024 AXA Foresight Report, called '100 Reasons to Love the Future,' a collaboration of ideas from "futurists, experts, business leaders, scientists, writers, artists, NGOs, and corporate organisations," from across all strands of society. The reasons in this report to love the future range from young people breaking down mental health stigma that has oppressed past generations to how science is helping to reverse coastline pollution to how iconic artwork is more accessible than ever.
When asked how they combat a sense of powerlessness about the future, Desbiey summed up the empowering message of the panel perfectly, “I think we are doomed to optimism…what is the alternative option?”