Making the future
Justin Mullins
The Tomorrow Project
When one of the world’s biggest technology firms wants to know what to build next, it turns to science fiction. Justin Mullins
reports
As resident futurist at the research laboratories of the giant chipmaker Intel in Portland, Oregon, Johnson studies how computing and the internet are likely to evolve, and how that evolution will change the way we live, work and play. Intel hopes his insights will help its engineers work out what kinds of devices people will want in a decade’s time and how they might use them.
Intel is far from the only big tech firm to employ a futurist. But what distinguishes Johnson is the way in which he arrives at his vision. Johnson is a collaborator. He believes that we can all take part in defining and determining the future. To that end, he established The Tomorrow Project: "It offers a way for people to become active participants in the future."
The Tomorrow Project’s roots lie in a process called science-fiction prototyping, which uses science fiction as a way to imagine the future and then engineer it. Johnson has been championing this approach among academics for the past five years. He has even written a book that is being used to teach people about the process. "Ultimately, science-fiction prototypes provide us with a vision of the future that we can actually build," he says.
He gives an example: a collaborative experiment examining the question of whether robots will ever have the freedom that humans enjoy (or, at least, the illusion of free will that we enjoy). The experiment involves a virtual robot called Jimmy, who can switch between two modes of behaviour. The first is an obedient bartender’s persona: ask Jimmy for a gin and tonic and he’ll make you one. The second persona is more rebellious, prone to challenging the status quo. Like a child, it constantly asks: "Why?"
These are behaviours that every human can act, mimic or imagine. Ask a friend for a gin and tonic and you’ll probably get one. Now place it on the floor and ask for another; you’ll probably get your second G&T. But if you keep repeating the process, placing the drink on the floor each time, your friend will get impatient and ask what you’re up to.
"Humans always question what’s going on by the fifth round of drinks," says Simon Egerton, a computer scientist based at the Monash University campus in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Egerton has performed the gin-and-tonic test on numerous hapless students as part of his research into how free will makes humans behave.
Jimmy, however, keeps bringing you drinks for as long as you keep asking. The strange thing is that he’s capable of questioning your requests: he could ask "why?" at any time. But he doesn’t. How come?
About five years ago, Johnson heard Egerton present a paper in which he argued that human beings use both rationality and irrationality to navigate the world. When rational approaches to a problem have been exhausted, acting irrationally may change our behaviour in a way that throws up new insights and fresh possibilities. The artificial intelligence programs that control today’s robots can only make rational decisions. If those can’t resolve a particular situation, the robot gets stuck.
Johnson was captivated by the idea that irrationality might help robots make better sense of the world. He began writing stories about the appearance of free will in machines, with a fictionalised version of Egerton as the human protagonist and a robot called Jimmy as the incipient robotic intelligence. Egerton in turn became fascinated by the ideas that Johnson was raising and began to explore them in his work, along with Vic Callaghan of the University of Essex, UK.
The experiment now running at Essex and Monash is the result. It is a virtual reality environment for testing Jimmy’s notion of free will. Anybody can upload an artificial intelligence program to control Jimmy, and anybody can interact with Jimmy and decide for themselves whether his behaviour is more human or robot-like.
The key challenge is to make Jimmy switch from one persona to another, without being explicitly programmed to do so, in response to a particular stimulus. In other words, it’s no good making him switch every time he has served up, say, five undrunk G&Ts: he needs to behave in a non-deterministic way. Solving this problem would be an important step in the process of giving robots free will, or at least the illusion of it.
This is science-fiction prototyping in action: a feedback process between storytelling and research. "That was an amazing moment in my career: starting a collaboration that explores new ideas and then puts them to the test," says Johnson. Egerton and Johnson have even speculated about using non-deterministic artificial intelligence programs to control a real bartending robot – effectively bringing Jimmy to life.
This kind of enthusiasm is not surprising from a man who says his background primed him for the job of forecasting the future. His father was a radar-tracking engineer and his mother an IT specialist working for the US government. "My father used to bring home the schematics of radar designs and tell me the story of how they all worked. Two weeks later he would show up with a piece of equipment," Johnson recalls. "I think I was raised to be a futurist."
Johnson took a degree in design and communication from the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. (Alvin Toffler, one of the world’s most famous futurists, once taught there.) Since then Johnson has worked as a software designer, industrial designer and creative art director before becoming the in-house futurist at Intel Labs in 2010. "I now spend all my time living in the 2019-20 timeframe," he says.
At Intel, his task is to brief chip designers about the requirements for the company’s next generation of products, working alongside ethnographers and anthropologists who study how people use computers. Design a television, an MP3 player or a washing machine, and you have a pretty good idea how the people who buy your product will use it. Intel’s products are different because of the time it takes to bring a chip to market.
"From the moment of conception to the moment a chip becomes available to buy, 10 years can go by," says Johnson. Conventional electronic products like video cameras and mobile phones have a product life-cycle measured in months or just a few years. Because of the rate at which the computer industry is changing, new applications, new products and even entirely new industries can emerge in the time it takes to develop a chip.
Fifteen years ago, portable media players, touchscreen phones and tablet computers simply didn’t exist, social networking and the cloud were unheard of, and digital cameras and GPS devices were just beginning to breach the public consciousness. Few would have predicted the change we have seen on such a scale, in such a short period of time.
And the next 10 years will probably be just as revolutionary. Today’s emerging technologies, such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and 3D printing, are likely to have profound impacts on society. But understanding how chips that are still on the drawing board might be used in 10 years’ time is not straightforward.
Intel is keen to avoid the undirected generation of new ideas that have little grounding in the way people live their lives. Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, says the leaders of many large technology companies are looking for the next big idea that will change the world. "Unfortunately, all these leaders confuse innovation with ideation, and that is a critical flaw. Ideas are cheap, a dime a dozen. Simply rustling up a bunch of half-baked ideas won’t make the world a better place."
The key to innovation is to go further, says Rattner. "Innovation begins with the exploration of a vision, perhaps a number of visions, for where we want to go and why we want to go there. We don’t even need to agree on a single vision, but we do need to clearly articulate each vision and engage in a conversation about it."
That’s why Intel needs a better way of looking into the future. "Science fiction based on science fact is a wonderful playground for the imagination," says Johnson. For him, the process of storytelling is crucial because the needs and desires, the hopes and fears of real humans can play out in a world modified in well-defined ways. "That gives insights that are just not possible in other ways," he says.
The Tomorrow Project is designed to encourage and catalyse those insights. Two years ago, Johnson invited bestselling science-fiction authors to describe their visions based on technologies that Intel was studying. The result was a published anthology of stories, including contributions from Cory Doctorow, Scarlett Thomas, Douglas Rushkoff and others; each painted a very different picture of the way technology will influence our lives.
But Johnson is well aware that individual visions of the future have limited utility. That’s why he’s interested in opening up the process to the very people who are likely to be using Intel’s products in 10 years’ time. "I wanted to find a way to get people to become active participants in the future, to have a fact-based, informed conversation about where we’re going," he says.
Last year the Tomorrow Project teamed up with the University of Washington in Seattle to host a project that invited submissions of short stories, comics and screenplays based on current scientific research and technology development. Again, the project resulted in an anthology of science fiction, based on science fact, which examined the real-life implications of these technologies.
And this year, the Tomorrow Project is collaborating with Arc
to invite people from all over the world to contribute to this process – both by submitting their own fiction based on science fact, and by discussing the issues those stories raise: hopes, fears, concerns and doubts. (You can find more details of how it will work below.)
Previous participants have found involvement in the Tomorrow Project rewarding. New York-based science fiction writer and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff was one of the first wave of writers commissioned by Johnson. He admits that he was initially suspicious that Intel would want a purely positive spin on the future. His own writing paints a darker vision of the future, in which humans are subjugated by machines and the corporations that build them.
But he was also attracted by the questions that science-fiction prototyping raises. "Is it the science-fiction writer pushing technology, or are current technologies pushing the writers? Did Star Trek
lead to the cellphone and the iPad?" he asks. "Maybe: they certainly had them on the TV programme, but it’s hard to know."
Once persuaded, he wrote a short story called The Last Day of Work
, which examines what happens to society when computers and robots are able to outperform humans. "My agenda is to promote humanity. People are much too willing to conform to the institutions around them and to deny their humanity. The result is that we’re in the process of making ourselves obsolete and inferior to technology, because we’re prioritising things that we don’t value."
This might not sound like good news for Intel, but Johnson says such dystopian perspectives are valuable. "Sometimes it can be more important to explore dark futures so that we understand why we might want to avoid them," he says.
One problem that Johnson and his colleagues have studied is the feeling of technological overload. When people are always online, they come to feel that they have no time for themselves. It’s a common complaint, but Johnson points out that the problem is a complex one. "Technology allows us to be connected, but it’s us who actually turn it on." We could just turn our phones and computers off – but we don’t. And we don’t blame ourselves for our lack of self-control: we blame our technology for being too addictive.
Among the themes emerging from the Tomorrow Project’s science fiction is the idea that personal technology in some way mirrors our own character. This has had an important influence on Intel’s next generation of laptops. These so-called Ultrabooks are designed to be easier to let go of. Even when (apparently) switched off, they will still tend to their owners’ digital lives, by processing emails, for example, and sending automated replies. The idea, Johnson says, is to make people more comfortable about closing their laptops.
Intel wants to encourage more of these ideas, and is hoping that the open forum provided by the Tomorrow Project will encourage them in ways that more traditional brainstorming or planning can’t. "The Tomorrow Project can become a place where we all engage in conversations about the future, about futures we want and futures we want to avoid. By participating in this conversation, each and every one of us can truly have a say, not just in our own future, but in the future of our entire planet," says Rattner.
Johnson, for his part, has big plans. He wants more people to participate in The Tomorrow Project than ever before. He is pursuing conversations all over the world: Brazil, India, China and Russia are in his sights. After all, the future belongs to all of us: all of us should have a hand in making it.
Arc
is partnering with The Tomorrow Project, sponsored by Intel, to encourage readers to offer their visions of the future. This article was produced by Arc
in association with The Tomorrow Project. Arc
retained complete editorial control over its content.