Future thinking is a practice. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Futurists can find signals of change in your social media community. When i was 15, the future seemed to be arriving too slowly and so i just wanted to be 25,. And so i spent time imagining it. Whereas when you're 53, the future seems to be coming too quick and you want to slow it down. It's not just about inventing things in our own mind, right? Because if we want to be ready now to shape the future by understanding the forces of change, the new technologies, the new social movements, we have to be aware of what they areght
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.
This is an episode of The TED Interview, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. You can find and follow it wherever you're listening to this.