The US State Department recently commissioned the first-ever assessment of proliferation and security risk from weaponized and misaligned AI. Researchers at Gladstone AI have just completed that assessment, as of late February 2024. Their report includes an analysis of catastrophic AI risks, and a “first-of-its-kind, government-wide Action Plan” for what we can do about them.

This perspective has been a long time coming. Over eight years ago, in 2015, I joined over 2,000 scientists and futurists in signing an open letter against weaponized AI. I won’t get too much into the current state here, as the Gladstone report is a richer perspective, but we need to all consider the obvious question of whether there exists either the will or ability to rein in the current, potentially dangerous trend. More on this from me later. For now, I encourage everyone to at least watch this short video and read the Executive Summary of the report posted on the Gladstone AI site.

 INTELLICON EURO 2023

13-15 November 2023 | Prague, Czech Republic

I am pleased to announce that I have been invited by the Strategic Consortium of Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) to conduct a workshop at Intellicon Euro 2023. SCIP is a great professional organization to which I have belonged for many years. Focused on strategy and competitive intelligence (CI), SCIP advocates the transformative power of intelligence-driven strategy.

The Euro 2023 conference theme is “CI and the Future of the Intelligence Ecosystem.” The programming is about the “wider Intelligence Ecosystem and how different organizations utilize and apply Competitive, Market, Economic, Human and Open Intelligence within various markets and industries.”

As both a strategic foresight and competitive intelligence professional, of course I’m excited to participate. I am also excited to visit Prague!

Here is the synopsis of the workshop I am conducting:

Strategic Foresight and Modelling Change in the Competitive Landscape

Understanding the shape and dynamics of the competitive landscape is critical to the strategic value of the competitive intelligence function. Attention to the structure of the competitive space and the underlying drivers of change will help an organization anticipate threats and opportunities such as emerging competitors, new technologies, potential investment moves and consolidation. By applying strategic foresight methods such as weak signal scanning, scenario planning, wargaming and ecosystem modeling, CI professionals can generate actionable insights to inform competitive responses, product roadmaps, and potential pathways to growth. This 75-minute workshop session will illustrate these methods/concepts through an interactive exercise in which participants will develop future scenarios for a technology competitive landscape given a set of underlying industry drivers and weak signals.

If interested in attending, or just interested in info, visit the SCIP website for details.

I will post a readout and likely some of the tools from the workshop after the conference.

After a long hiatus, during which I have been busy working and traveling the world, I return to this site to blog on foresight and futures again. During my time away, I have not been idle. I have visited nine new countries, climbed mountains, learned to scuba dive, backpacked jungles, and so many more adventures.

On the futures front, I finished my MS in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston in 2021 and have completed some very interesting foresight projects, for third parties and also for my employer.

I admit too that, since 2016, I put a lot of my focus on political activism, which was somewhat new to me, but which I felt was critical given the outcome of that year’s US presidential election.

Finally, another factor in my blog hiatus is that I lost my Kiteba.com domain name about five years ago to some Japanese domain collector who tried to sell it back to me at an illogical price. But good news … they just this month dropped it, and I snagged it back on the open market. Definitely a lesson here: keep on top of your domain renewals.

Anyway, much has transpired with me and with the world since I last posted. I’ll share my thoughts as I get back into blogging here, which I hope will be more regular.

— Eric Kingsbury

In the rapid-change business environment, innovation has become the holy grail in terms of competitive advantage. Defined by Merriam-Webster as “a new idea, method, or device,” innovation tends to inform all parts of the successful operation, from obvious areas like product development to unexpected areas like financial reporting. Because the sources of global business advantage have evolved from operational efficiencies, where now most businesses are able to achieve competitive parity through access to the same technologies and processes, to differentiation, where every opportunity to stand out from the competition can result in increased market share and profits, innovation is even more essential.

Innovation is nothing new, of course, but because other sources of advantage have been exhausted, as Tim Brown notes, business “leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage” (2). In the search for innovation, several approaches for developing new ideas, methods, or devices have shown promise, and design futures, as a fusion of design thinking and strategic foresight, is one that organizations should consider incorporating into their innovation processes because it addresses a longer view, pluralizes the future, and engages multiple stakeholders in creating innovation.

Typically, corporate strategic planning processes look at more immediate horizons, usually less than three years. While, as Bradford notes, there should be a relationship between the planning horizon and “the future environment in which the organization will be operating,” the majority of organizations align strategic planning horizons with budgetary cycles, i.e. one year. There is no doubt tremendous value to reviewing and adjusting strategy on an annual basis, but one year is too short a view to address large-scale changes in the macro environment that present significant disruptive threats to product lines, regional markets, and overall competitive positioning. Because strategic foresight emphasizes longer horizons, as well as a broader view of the macro environment, it provides a much-needed complement to traditional strategic planning.

However, while strategic foresight in the most common form of scenario planning may provide useful views of the futures in which the business may operate, it may not necessarily activate the kind of intellection and creativity that will embed a view of the company into the future and thus help drive innovation. Because design futures can bring together design processes, particularly design thinking methods, with strategic foresight, and can bring to life scenarios in tangible ways, corporations should not only employ strategic foresight in the strategic planning cycle but also include exercises in design futures, particularly with product and marketing teams.

Additionally, because strategic foresight “pluralizes the future,” or seeing the future not as one fixed outcome, but rather multiple possibilities, it can provide tremendous value by stimulating conditional and “what-if” thinking in the strategic planning process (van Alstyne 70). With design futures, this pluralization of the future allows for the development of multiple tangible scenarios that can bring to life different product options, as well as different strategic responses to possible changes in the environment, whether those changes are competitive or social, economic, political or otherwise.

To even further imagine, for instance, opportunities for value chain innovation based on multiple contingencies in availability of resources, or environmental regulations, may lead to approaches that could provide differentiation. What if we source our raw materials differently? What if our products use different materials? What are the range of options if certain laws are passed or consumer values change? Such questions can drive innovative thinking, but when the organization can imagine answers to these questions in tangible prototypes, the design futures exercise can gain weight and organizational traction in ways a text-based futures exercise might not be able to do.

Finally, if executed properly, design futures exercises can bring multiple organizational stakeholders together to collaborate on innovation in a very hands-on fashion. One of the challenges with innovation as practiced in many organizations is that innovation is considered the exclusive work of product developers or engineers; everyone else is excluded from the exercise of and responsibility for innovation. Such attitudes do not create the culture of innovation that mark the most successful companies. If instead people from marketing, product, finance, sales, and operations can collaborate on prototyping multiple future scenarios in a robust way, in a way that illustrates possible futures that can be experienced, as good design futures scenarios should do, it not only infuses a broader stake in innovation, it paves the way for the broad organizational cooperation that will make new initiatives more successful.

In conclusion, in order to better differentiate and innovate, organizations need to look at longer horizons and the broader environment. Strategic foresight provides the tools to do so, but in order to really engage an organization in innovation and differentiation, design futures provides probably the most useful set of tools because design futures is tangible, plural and can engage multiple stakeholders in hands-on collaboration.

Postscript:

As an interesting, if imperfect, example of a business-oriented design futures exercise, consider this exercise by Pamela Duque for Zara.

—-

References:

Bradford, Robert W. “Strategic Planning Horizon: How Far Out Should You Plan.” Center for Simplified Strategic Planning. http://www.cssp.com/strategicplanning/blog/strategic-planning-horizon-how-far-out-should-you-plan/

Brown, Tim. “Design Thinking.” Harvard Business Review. June 2008.

Merriam-Webster. “Definition of innovation.” Merriam-Webster Online. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation

Van Alstyne, Greg. “How We Learned to Pluralize the Future.” Creating Desired Futures: How Design Thinking Innovates Business. Basel, 2009, pp. 69-72.

Join the Arizona chapter of the World Future Society on Tuesday, June 27, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the Scottsdale Civic Center Library for an engaging presentation on Science Fiction and the Future. Tom Lombardo will be continuing his lecture from last month’s meeting, with Science Fiction: The Golden Age to the Singularity and Beyond. RSVP here. I hope you can join us!

Science Fiction: The Golden Age to the Singularity and Beyond

Speaker: Dr. Tom Lombardo

Science fiction is the most visible, influential, and populous contemporary form of futurist thinking and imagination in the modern world. For an immense number of people science fiction has become a way of life. It is the evolutionary mythology of the future.

Following Tom Lombardo’s stimulating presentation last month tracing the history of science fiction from ancient times to the cosmic visions of “Doc” Smith’s seminal space operas and Olaf Stapledon’s evolutionary sagas of future humanity and the universe, in this follow-up talk Tom will continue and complete his journey forward, chronicling the subsequent decades of consciousness-expanding thought and imagination in science fiction up to present times.

Beginning with the Golden Age of science fiction in the 1940s, including Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, and Clarke, Tom will successively cover: the Silver Age, with the “explosion” of science fiction cinema, the fantastical psychological science fiction of Alfred Bester, and the meta-realities of Philip K. Dick; the New Wave and the “Dangerous Visions” of the 1960s and 1970s, sex, drugs, and the psychedelic in science fiction, and the rise of popularity of women science fiction writers, such as Ursula LeGuin and James Tiptree, Jr.; “How Science Fiction Conquered the World” in the 1980s, comedy and satire, computer technology and  AI, and the emergence of Cyberpunk; Steampunk, Watchmen, ecological and bio-tech science fiction, and mind-blowing experiments in reality in the 1990s; and stories of global consciousness, the “New Weird,” alternative realities and universes, passing through the technological singularity, and a thousand Sci-Fi movies (with super-heroes and anti-heroes galore) since the beginning of the new Millennium.

Please Note: If you missed the first talk, you can enjoy and get into this second talk without any problem.

About Tom Lombardo

Thomas Lombardo, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Future Consciousness and The Wisdom Page, the Managing Editor of the online journal Wisdom and the Future, and Professor Emeritus and retired Faculty Chair of Psychology, Philosophy, and the Future at Rio Salado College, Tempe, Arizona. He has published seven books and over fifty articles, and given an equal number of national and international presentations on diverse psychological, philosophical, and futurist topics. A member of numerous futurist organizations and contributing editor to futurist journals, his newest book Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution has been described as a “masterpiece” and “truly breathtaking,” “a deeply wise book for a wise future…challenging us to take our everyday thinking to a whole new epic scale.” He is presently working on a new book series Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future, covering the history of science fiction from Prometheus to the “Singularity” and beyond.

Join the Arizona chapter of the World Future Society on Thursday, May 18, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the Scottsdale Civic Center Library for an engaging presentation on Science Fiction and the Future. Tom Lombardo, who was recently honored as a World Future Studies Federation Fellow, will be previewing his forthcoming book, Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future. RSVP here. I hope you can join us!

About Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future

Science fiction is the most visible and influential form of futurist thinking in contemporary pop culture. Why is science fiction so popular? Similar in myriad ways to the great myths of the past, science fiction speaks to the whole person—intellect, imagination, emotion, and the senses—providing expansive narratives that enlighten, motivate, and engage. Facilitating the holistic psychological development of what I refer to as “future consciousness”—our integrative awareness of the future—science fiction has, for many people, become a way of life and a way of experiencing reality and creating the future.

As futurist narrative, science fiction encompasses the future of everything, and even extends beyond into alternative and higher dimensional realities. This presentation, introducing my new book series, offers a sweeping overview of the evolution of science fiction—from Prometheus and the ancient Greeks, to H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, and into the present with Star Wars, Watchmen, and transcendence through the “Singularity”—highlighting the importance of mythic consciousness within the human mind. We will consider how science fiction has emerged as the most powerful and relevant mythology of contemporary times, informing and inspiring futurist thinking in our modern world. We will examine how science fiction advances the purposeful evolution of future consciousness, and why it is the evolutionary mythology of the future.

What Others are Saying about Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future  

“For those interested in science fiction, cultural history, or the interplay of myth, science, and literature, Tom Lombardo has given us a veritable cornucopia of fascinating and enlightening information about science fiction and its place in the story of civilization. For those of us interested in the history of ideas and especially the role played by science fiction in the evolution of consciousness and our awareness of the future, Lombardo’s work will be the touchstone for many years to come.”

— Allan Leslie Combs, Ph.D., CIIS Professor of Consciousness Studies

“Professor Lombardo’s encyclopedic assessment of science fiction as a uniquely evolutionary art form is mind candy of the highest order — must reading for serious fans of the genre. ”

— Oliver Markley, Professor Emeritus, Graduate Studies of the Future, University of Houston-Clear Lake

“Tom Lombardo dives into some of the eternal questions of science fiction, its relationship with tomorrow, with the universe, and with the vastly more complex realm within each human brain and heart.”

— David Brin, Author of Startide Rising, The Uplift War, The Postman, and Existence

About Tom Lombardo

Thomas Lombardo, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Future Consciousness and The Wisdom Page, the Managing Editor of the online journal Wisdom and the Future, and Professor Emeritus and retired Faculty Chair of Psychology, Philosophy, and the Future at Rio Salado College, Tempe, Arizona. He has published seven books and over fifty articles, and given an equal number of national and international presentations on diverse psychological, philosophical, and futurist topics. A member of numerous futurist organizations and contributing editor to futurist journals, his newest book Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution has been described as a “masterpiece” and “truly breathtaking,” “a deeply wise book for a wise future…challenging us to take our everyday thinking to a whole new epic scale.” He is presently working on a new book series Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future, covering the history of science fiction from Prometheus to the “Singularity” and beyond.

Speculative fiction has always been a great way to imagine the future. The following is a short climate-related piece I wrote.

A Life Pod at Riverton

“When we look at biological analogues,” Jane began, lifting the cover off the evap system and dropping to one knee, “we see the many ways in which large organisms are vulnerable when climate push comes to climate shove.”

The sun hovered in an infinite sky, bright, blanching out any atmospheric color. It was spring, and the air was warming, with a sweet sugar breeze.

Jane lifted a hand to shadow her eyes.

“Elephants, lions, cows, all the big mammals,” she said, then gestured in the direction of several grassy mounds that rose from the prairie. “Too big, too slow, too pack-oriented. Vulnerable.”

Then, she reached into the evap unit and pulled out a length of rotten rubber hose.

“So too all the networks dependent on leaders,” she went on. “Bees and the like. Vulnerable.”

“And now mostly gone,” I added, handing her a wrench.

“Yep,” she reached into the opening at the base of the evap unit to screw down a new hose. “Humans in our old hierarchical mode as well. You know what almost happened to us. It’s amazing to think that the principles that gave us such tremendous adaptive benefits in the past would lead us to disaster.”

“The greed, the dependency, the consumption,” I agreed.

It seemed everyone was talking this way now, I thought to myself, after ten years of utter madness. A sudden sanity had taken hold and was spreading across a ravaged world.

It was a simple idea, a small idea in a way, but the life pod concept did it; it catalyzed the clarity, the life-affirming sanity that had begun to sweep over us all.

I had been unrooted for several years, waiting on various waiting lists. They were difficult years, but in late March, I was offered a pod in this section of the plains, and so I had made my way by foot and auto from the east coast to this new Midwestern place, Riverton. After everything went down, and society fell apart, we all abandoned the old places, the cities and towns, just left them behind where they were. We made new places, like Riverton here.

“I get it now,” she said, flipping the master switch on my life pod, “It took me a while. The problem was always the grid systems. Millions, billions of people depending on these artificial networks — agriculture, economy, power — that others control, that bunched up masses of people. Exploitation was inevitable.”

The machinery within the life pod woke up and began to hum its soft, green-power hum. Water condensing from the air, circulating in the grow systems. Photovoltaics and wind turbines charging batteries. Air scrubbers.

Jane had been one of the earliest Riverton residents, she told me, and now it was her turn to welcome me, the newest resident.

As we waited for the life pod to flush its air and water circulators through the three rooms, the garden terrace, the aquaponics, Jane offered me a glass of water from a bottle dangling from her belt. We sat on a bench in front of the main door.

“I met Sam Turner once,” she said, then laughed at my surprised expression. “He came through here seeding the pod plans, the 3D printers, helping us put it all together. I’ve been here since the beginning.”

“Wow,” I said, sipping from the cup of water. It was fresh and clear. “They say he’s disappeared.”

“Well, he moved on from here. But the pods are everywhere. They’re how we live now.”

I nodded.

Yeah, it was a small idea, a simple idea. Just give everyone a life support system, a life pod. Provide each person with an automated domicile that produces water, fish, vegetables, fresh air, security. One integrated life support system, complete in itself, powered by itself, easy to build with surviving technology, easy to maintain.

And the repercussions were simple too: no money, no economy, no deprivation, no starvation, everyone with their own place, with the freedom of guaranteed sustenance. You owned a life pod, and it’s all you could own, all you needed to own. The small barter markets of goods and services were for entertainment, diversion. Nobody’s life depended on them.

That was Turner’s gift to a world that needed both liberation and healing.

After a few minutes, the light on the front of my life pod toggled from red to green with an audible click.

“Well, here you are,” Jane smiled and patted my knee. “Welcome home.”

She stood and walked off into the bright April day, waving at me. I waved back and looked again at the rising mounds to the east, now luminous with spring grass.

Here I am.