Subject(s):
GRAY SCOTT
GRAY SCOTT
An edible, 3-D cake created with a ChefJet printer.
GRAY SCOTT
GRAY SCOTT
A 3-D printed abstract shape, like a Rorschach “hack” to energize creativity.

From printable foods to rights for robots, science fiction and science fact are becoming harder to distinguish. Both begin with pictures in the mind’s eye.

What if visualization, imagination, and art could change the future? Life imitates art, and life is now imitating science fiction.

Visualize this. Imagine a time in the future filled with “magical” technologies. Vertical farms, teleportation of 3-D printable food, and advanced biotechnology have eradicated hunger around the world. Age reversal has become possible, and human longevity has reached several hundred years. Automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and the new age of advanced self-replicating robots have freed humanity of the archaic idea of work. The word “job” has vanished from the human lexicon. Humans now spend their time in pursuit of higher realms of artistic, cognitive, and scientific exploration.

Imagine a future where we have become a multi-planetary species, with colonies on Mars, Titan, and Europa. Rumors of the first successful time-travel jump are circulating, and humanity finalizes its constitution of “Rules and Ethics of Time Travel.” Teleportation of people and goods has become common, and we are on the verge of becoming interstellar beings. We are projecting our consciousness into the cosmos. We are dancing among the stars.

Sexbots have begun to demand digital rights, voting rights, and the right to unionize. Pure-bio women are electing to use artificial wombs to birth their babies, and an entire generation of women never know what natural childbirth is like.

Advanced robotics and biotechnology in the future have allowed humans to create personal DNA replicant robots, known as clonebots. These clonebots act as representatives in our absence and have the same rights as the original human. Clonebots have been capped at three per person, except for celebrities, who can pay a clonebot tax for each additional clonebot. The rigid membrane of personhood begins to become more porous in the future. Man and machine have become almost indistinguishable, and we have become transhuman.

This future is a post-privacy age of total cooperative and holistic transparency. Digitally assisted telepathy and brain–computer interface devices have forced hackers, corporations, and governments to drop the veil of anonymity. Nationalism is a thing of the past. The concept of the individual is rejected in many cultures in favor of digital hive mind. Freed from the burdens of maintaining the needs of the individual self, humanity begins to develop at an astonishing rate. Like any other evolutionary process, the future is becoming more complex.

Fiction or Fact? Dystopia Or Utopia?

This future visualization I have just described may sound like science fiction to most people outside of the futures and foresight field, but the fact is, technologists and scientists around the world at this very moment are trying to make these futures a reality. Is this future visualization the future we want for ourselves?

For some, the visualization described above may sound like a dreadful dystopian nightmare, but for others, it may sound like a true utopia. Governments, philosophers, and universities will be debating these scenarios for years. Wars will rage over what direction to proceed into the future, but one thing remains: The future begins to form by visualizing what we want, what we prefer, and what we fear. As philosopher Alan Watts once said, “Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.”

Today, science fiction and science fact are becoming hard to distinguish. Science-fiction writers must almost play in the realm of fantasy to be ahead of our current science. Every new headline sounds like a parody or an April Fools’ joke. I often find myself checking the research from major news sources just to confirm that the stories are real. It feels as if we are slipping faster and faster into the future.

So where do these future ideas emerge from? What is the connection between visualization and the material world? Can we use the power of future visualization to influence our future?

I was first introduced to the concept of future visualization by a private art instructor—a gifted woman in her 60s with an amazing eye for light, color, and design. She talked of seasonal color and light reflected on hard surfaces. She talked of perception, contrast, and the mind’s eye. During our second session together, she leaned in over my shoulder to see what I was sketching and said, “You must see the finished image in your mind first. If you can’t visualize it in your mind’s eye, you will never be able to paint it.”

She asked the students to stop drawing, close our eyes, and “see” the image in our minds’ eyes. I had never heard of the mind’s eye. I had no idea what she was referring to. She began to lead us into a guided visualization. I had never consciously sat and visualized beforehand a picture in my mind. Suddenly, as she was talking, I was able to control the light in the landscape. I could move the sun around. I could change the elevation of the mountains and turn the sky into deep shades of gold and purple. I could see the sunlight reflecting off the water of a brisk stream. I could see the leaves twisting in the fall wind. I began to “see” the finished picture in my mind in vivid detail. She finished the guided visualization and said, “Open your eyes and draw what you see.”

Her words and this act of visualization changed the course of my life forever. I was 10 years old. Little did either of us know at the time, but she had just taught me to become a futurist. From that moment forward, I have used future visualization to see the outcome I prefer in my personal, professional, and social life. I have used it to visualize better future scenarios.

The best predictor of future visualization is past visualization—sort of. Most innovators, artists, and futurists know a great secret: To change the world, you need to see things in a new way. You must turn the world on its head and invert the status quo. We must travel into undiscovered territories of the mind and become a student of risk. Seek out the underdog and find out everything they know. Study the geometry in nature. Look for the hidden connections in every obscure pattern. This undiscovered cosmos of information is all around us, and it is the key to visualizing the future we prefer.

To visualize our future, we must bravely dialogue with our unconscious minds. We must jump off high intellectual ledges into the primal darkness. Not everyone will do this work and not everyone can survive this work, but if we ever hope to become an evolved species worthy of interstellar travel, our cosmos will accept nothing less. Black holes and supernovas be damned, we must visualize ourselves living long and prospering.

It is this counterintuitive approach to the future that has given us great technological advancements, brilliant minds, and visionary leaders. But now we face a world in great peril. The climate is a mess, our oceans are reaching toxic tipping points, and our children are mass murdering each other in schools around the world. How do we teach future visualization, bravery, and innovation to our children? How do we help our friends, clients, and parents to understand this process?

The best way is to develop programs, classes, and workshops based on preferred future visualization. Why should we accept poverty, pollution, and hunger as realities that cannot be changed? Why not teach our children to visualize futures they want? Most inner-city children have never been asked to visualize a utopian future for themselves. Sure, we ask them what college they want to attend, what they want to be when they grow up, and how much money they want to make. But when do we give them the freedom to visualize their very own utopia and then ask them to go out and make it happen? Why do we limit our imaginations when we now know that science fiction and fantasy are becoming realities?

The future will be built in the imagination of the brave people who believe anything is possible.

Science Fiction Fact

Science-fiction writers have had an enormous influence on science, art, and the development of cultures around the world. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, and George Orwell are just a few who once envisioned technologies that we have developed today. Some of them tried to warn us of possible doom, and others tried to inspire us to achieve greater futures.

No one helped generalized future visualization to the masses more effectively than Gene Roddenberry, best known for creating the original Star Trek series. Even if you have never read a science-fiction novel, you know what Star Trek is. Roddenberry helped culture around the world to visualize the concept of a tricorder, the wireless communicator, and transporters that famously beamed our future space crew up and down to alien worlds.

However, the future visualizations from the original Star Trek as well as Star Trek: The Next Generation are now becoming science fact. For example, the Star Trek food replicator now exists. The 3D Systems ChefJet™ can print geometric chocolate candy and cakes on demand. Captain Kirk’s handheld communicator manifested as the first-generation mobile revolution flip phones, and the tractor-beam technology that captured the Starship Enterprise so often is becoming a reality. Physicists at New York University have been able to capture and move microscopic particles using a so-called optical conveyor tractor beam.

“This is science fiction made real,” says NYU physics professor David Grier, one of the co-authors of a paper on the optical conveyor. “This tractor beam moves objects back to its source, just like those in so many sci-fi movies, but with very small pieces.” This technology may not be capturing alien warships anytime soon, but this is another great example of how science imitates science fiction.

Science fiction acts as a philosophical and psychological playground, a place to safely decode what I call the future maps of cultural echoes. These future maps begin in the imagination and psychology of each culture. If we want to visualize these future maps, all we need to do is listen to the patterns echoing over and over in culture.

One pattern that echoes in every culture is the desire and drive to move information. The cosmos appears to be an infinitely regressive information system, and one of the rules of this system is to keep moving information. The echo here is simple: Move information, and move it fast. Science-fiction writers who see these echoes are the ones who write about teleportation, interstellar travel, and wormhole travel.

Teleportation was once believed to be impossible. However, Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai claims to have teleported entangled photons over a distance of 97 kilometers (about 60 miles). We won’t be able to teleport ourselves to our next vacation destination in the next five years, but we will see advancements in this technology over the next several decades.

Another example of cultural echoes is the explosion of social media. Before social networks like Facebook and Twitter, people felt unheard and unseen. Call it armchair protesting if you like, but social networks have given people a way to organize. We have witnessed toxic corporations, unjust governments, and occasionally nasty celebrities brought to their knees because of these social networks.

Facebook tapped into that cultural echo and saw this future map. Mark Zuckerberg must have visualized a glimpse of this future map when he rushed to build Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. The echo was the need to voice a collective opinion (on the attractiveness of female students at the time). Zuckerberg heard the echo and created a future map from it.

Today we have Google Glass, Muse (EEG brain sensing headband) by InteraXon, and driverless cars. All are reflections of ideas and fantasies found in science fiction and cultural echoes. I just keep imagining Gene Roddenberry at his typewriter closing his eyes and visualizing a new horizon, a new humanity, a new future.

Simply put, these works of future visualization act as a receiver for our cultural unconscious and collective futures to emerge. Some are based on hard science, and some are based on fantasy. Both help to visualize our future. Both are relevant, and both are necessary to escape the suffocating void of the “give me proof” crowd.

Someone must visualize what may be waiting on the horizon, provable or not, and futurists can do this through a deep understanding of cultural echoes and pattern recognition.

Hacking the Collective Neural Network

Futurists, science-fiction writers, artists, and designers can actually “hack” neural pathways. That is, they can influence the growth of new neural networks within the human mind by using visualization. I often hear people say “mind blown” when they read about future technologies. What they really mean is “mind hacked.”

Their brains are literally creating new pathways. Creating new associations among neurons, this play between the white and gray matter of the human brain affords future visualization its greatest power. If you change the brain and the culture, then the innovations—and eventually the world—will follow.

Each of us lives under the influence of our own personal neural networks. People who believe anything is possible live in a neural network that is rich with future potential. These are the remarkable leaders and visionaries of our time. Yet, sadly, people who are under the influence of negative neural networks often foster and strengthen these negative networks in every decision they make. The “three-pound universe” they live in is a dystopian place filled with bad luck and unhappily ever-afters. Orwellian overlords, climate-change Armageddons, and Big Brother dystopias are the only future they can visualize.

Yet, in the face of some of our greatest current challenges, we see incredible innovations and technologies growing at an exponential pace around the world. For example, a 17-year-old U.S. high-school student named Jack Andraka developed the first early test for pancreatic cancer. An 18-year-old girl named Eesha Khare created a supercapacitor that can charge a cell phone in 20 seconds. And in Istanbul, 16-year-old Elif Bilgin created a bioplastic made from banana peels. These are the neural networks, the utopian three-pound universes, that will change our future. So how can we alter and hack into our neural networks?

The fastest way to hack our personal and collective neural network is to visualize the future as we wish it to be. Visualize a future world. What is the climate like in this future world? What challenges can you imagine that this world will face, and what innovations need to be applied? What does it feel like to live in this world? What does the horizon look like? What is the environment like?

Science-fiction writers call this scenario world building, but I call it future building. It is a powerful visualization that can be used in corporate, economic, and creative futurology. Stepping away from the statistics can allow us and our clients to reboot and hack into a new level of pattern recognition and innovation.

I’ve begun to produce 3-D printed abstract shapes as a way to energize my writing and my creative approach to visualizing the future. Think of them as 3-D Rorschach hacks for the neural networks. I can project my vision and imagination onto these objects and dive down into the details. I can imagine these objects as vertical farms, or turn them sideways and picture them as a future floating city. This exercise has sparked multiple ideas about architectural surfaces, environmental innovations, and rainwater purification. Using these real-world abstract shapes can inspire and rejuvenate our perceptions of time, space, and the future.

Another way that we can tap into future visualization is by using augmented and virtual reality. The ability to project our imagination onto the real world will change the way we visualize the future. Imagine if the brilliant architect Zaha Hadid could put on a pair of augmented-reality glasses that enabled her to walk out into an undeveloped landscape and design within the environment. She could then transform and visualize her newest building in real time. She could construct her vision of the design and see it in this augmented state, then send the design to her team.

The space-time between imagination and creation is getting smaller as we move toward smaller computers and wearable technologies. Google Glass may have been the first to make wearable smart glasses known to a wide audience, but the field is about to get very crowded. Smart glasses like MetaPro, Recon Jet, Telepathy One, Epiphany Eyewear, Vuzix M100, and GlassUp are just a few innovative smart glasses to emerge recently. All of these smart glasses will allow us to hack into our reality and our visualizations in the near future.

In his latest book, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, physicist Michio Kaku talks extensively about telepathy, telekinesis, mind reading, and a Brain Net to replace the Internet. All are fascinating ideas of how we will be able to hack into our collective neural network.

I imagine that in the near future we will have the ability to record our visualizations and print them out into 3-D forms. Just send your vision of a new design or sculpture directly to your 3-D printer from your EEG-enabled smart glasses, and in a matter of minutes you have a perfect visualized idea in your hands.

From imagination to reality in the blink of an eye. This is the future.

About the Author

Gray Scott is a futurist, speaker, artist, writer, and editorial director of SeriousWonder.com. He is a contributing writer for The Futurist Blog and a professional member of the World Future Society. He lives in New York City.

This article is a preview of his presentation at WorldFuture 2014: What If, the World Future Society’s conference to be held in Orlando, Florida, July 11-13.