This season of the ted interview is all about the future of intelligence and the future of work. If i were to ask you what you were thinking about right before you pressed a play on this podcast, there's a good chanceyou were thinking about the future. A growing bo of evidence that suggests our ability to think about the future may be a corner stone of our intelligence as a species. But it also raises an interesting possibility that maybe we could train ourselves to get better at thinking about the past.
Future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal ran a social simulation game in 2008 that had players dealing with the effects of a respiratory pandemic set to happen in the next decade. She wasn’t literally predicting the 2020 pandemic—but she got eerily close. Her game, set in 2019, featured scenarios we're now familiar with (like masking and social distancing), and participant reactions gave her a sense of what the world could—and eventually, did—look like. How did she do it? And what can we learn from this experiment to predict—and prepare for—the future ourselves? In this episode, Jane teaches us how to be futurists, and talks about the role of imagination—and gaming—in shaping a future that we’re truly excited about. Jane’s new book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today is available now.
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