Hope & Dread Extra: Amy Webb

Hope & Dread Extra: Amy Webb brings you more from the futurist Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute and author of The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. 

Hope & Dread Extra is a series of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring your season favorites from Hope & Dread. Our guests were brimming with additional ideas and extra insights that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. Join hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman for new Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

This is Hope & Dread Extra. I’m Charlotte Burns.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I’m Allan Schwartzman. 

Charlotte Burns:

Hope & Dread was a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art. We’ve heard from people who are making change and from people who are resisting change.

Our guests were brimming with ideas and off-topic thoughts that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting-room floor. So now, we’re bringing you a set of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring some of your season favorites, which we’ll be dropping twice a week. 

Today we’re bringing you more from Amy Webb, the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute and the author of a new book, The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. Here, Amy talks about the unbelievable pace of progress and how that’s causing power to shift. 

Amy Webb: 

When you define power and power structures, it's useful to broaden that definition. Because there are obviously individual people in their communities, but there's also, in a more ambiguous way, behavior and belief. And behavior and belief really do shift the dynamics of how decisions are made, and where the concentration of decision-making happens.

So I would say at the moment, there are a handful of those seismic shifts underway. One has to do with science, which I think makes a lot of sense; we're emerging from a global pandemic. And strangely enough, in a lot of countries around the world, the most trusted profession, the most trusted people, are scientists. And yet, there's very low trust when it comes to certain areas of science. Right? So there's a power dynamic underway that is shifting the trust that we have in the scientists, and instead, the trust that we have in the networks of people sharing information and their own takes on what they think the science is, right?

So, I would say that there are some changes in where and how power is accumulated and distributed. But there's also forces like nationalism, which are starting to shift who gets elected and who is in power. 

It is amazing to me... I've got an 11-year-old daughter. And in her world, a trans person is no different from any other person. There's no value associated with that. Two women being married is no different to her; there is no difference, right? When my husband and I were growing up, things were very, very, different. In less than a generation, at least in the communities where we hang, like, in our perception of the world, this dynamic has completely changed. And in lightning-fast time. 

And typically, when any society or group of people goes through that much change that fast, you wind up with people who are happy about those changes, as we are, and you wind up with a bunch of people who are pretty displeased. Because it asks them to change their mental model quickly. And that's cognitively kind of difficult. It's just, it's a difficult process for a lot of people. So what does that create? It creates a vacuum and a new power center. 

So I think you can look at things like the rise of nationalism, the rise of discrimination against different people, some of the hate that we're seeing, as a result ... I think some of this is resulting from the just unbelievable pace of progress. Which for some people asks them to question their core beliefs—and a lot of people don’t like to feel like change is happening without them having any say in what's happening.

You know, and the reality is that culture is being created, and art, and language, and just behavior, everything is being created now in a much more diffuse way. And wealth disparity is a growing problem, right? Nobody would dismiss that. 

So on the one hand, you have a greater concentration of ideas and culture building among this set of people who's able to be in the right place at the right time. And then, on the other hand, you've got people, organizations, and countries who are going in a different direction and creating their own reality in other ways.

Now, you asked me about China. It's useful to think of interfaces. Because your interface is really, in many ways, it heavily influences how you perceive the world around you, even when you are looking at that world on a digital device. The placement of icons, the design, the colors that are used, the physical steps, the interactions. These are subtle things but they really do shift your perception, and how you engage with the world around you. So, in some ways, the people who create the interface that runs on a Huawei phone are just as influential as a government that has a backdoor into that interface and can siphon off data on the other side. Right? It's the choices that are made.

I think there's—and this is true of every community—here's the bubble where the main event's happening. But there's the rest of the world that's contributing to change in some way. It's just, sometimes that other part of the world really gets overlooked.

Amy Webb:

If you're really thinking about the future and being an epicenter of critical thought and ideas, and inspiration, and all the other things that are in all the mission statements of all these places, then what is the job that you're serving for me? And how is that different from somebody else? It's a more sophisticated approach, I think.

The bigger issue, as far as I'm concerned, is five to six to seven years from now what bring-your-own technologies are you, as an institution, going to be competing against when people are onsite with you. 

We know that sometime 18 to 24 months from now, smart glasses will be in market. They may be not will have reached critical mass within the market, but they'll be in market. In what ways do people start to experience you and the world around you differently when they've got both augmented, but also diminished, reality access in front of their eyes. And what changing expectations will people have when they've got the ability to do more telehealth and teleconferencing. There's a direct connection between that and physical experiences that people have in places. 

This does not mean that every museum on the planet should go out and build a virtual reality experience. Which is, unfortunately, what I do see. I see a little bit of that happening. I think the more challenging piece of this is to really map out what are all the plausible futures that might confront our current cherished beliefs. And what does all that potentially look like.

Charlotte Burns:

So looking at those possible futures, do you see that the role of the institutions feels robust to you, to handle those challenges?

Amy Webb:

No, it does not. I think one of the things that we have seen, across many sectors, is that the role of the institution was diminished—greatly diminished—in the wake of decentralized action and community. 

So, clearly, we are going through a moment of significant transition in how we communicate, what we communicate, what we create. And I don't think this is going to get resolved. 

And because these forces of change are so significant, you're seeing two things happen. One is that the role of the institution in some cases is diminished. Or, there's just another entity that is able to exert more control. 

Or, on the flip side, you see some institutions doubling down on pretty polarizing decisions, as a way to force their ideas through. I don't think we have any resolution anytime soon. Because there is so much happening. So I think the real question, therefore, we ask is, how do we navigate all of this?

Is there a middle ground? Right? I haven't seen a lot of people having this bigger conversation, right. What do we believe? Can we think about the factors that enabled us to arrive at this place? And what does that mean? 

Sometimes having these slightly more ambiguous conversations that force us to challenge what we hold very deeply—what we believe—and conversations that force us into re-perception—to seeing the signals around us, just in different ways—and to challenge our own accounting of history, sometimes that is the best way forward. The conversation. It's the beginning of that resolution between all those other tensions.

You have to learn how to do that. You have to be willing to learn how to do that. And to sit with ambiguity. And in the wake of anxiety—anxiety results from uncertainty. It's because we don't have a plan. You have to learn how to be okay feeling a little anxious. But this is a challenging like most people don't want to do that. They just want to be told what the answer is and get along the way.

The problem is when your answer and somebody else's answer conflict.

Charlotte Burns:

The show is Hope and Dread. Do you feel hopeful? Do you feel dread?

Amy Webb:

Yeah. So, most of the time, I see apocalyptic hellscapes of doom in front of us. That's what I see the future is. But ultimately, I'm hopeful that I can do something to create a better future, as long as I put in the hard work. So I'm somebody who tends to seem doom and gloom. But I'm usually optimistic that I can do something to change and to create a better future.

Charlotte Burns:

For more from Amy, tune in to episode three of Hope & Dread, “Controlling Culture”, episode six, “Take Me To Your Leader” and episode 12, “Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?”. 

Listen to Hope and Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts. 

Hope and Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. 

The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Robert Bound is our associate editor. 

Holly Fisher mixes and edits the sound. 

Additional research has been provided by Julia Hernandez. 

And our theme music by the inimitable Philip Glass.