136: The Future

Written March 4, 2025

Photo by Iván Díaz on Unsplash

Hi, everyone, welcome to March! This month, we’re continuing the Intentional Alternatives series with a look at our cultural attitudes towards the future. With explorations to Mars and AI continuously dominating news headlines, it can feel like we’re living in a science fiction novel. I had never been very interested in science fiction until a few years ago when I was introduced to the book Parable of the Sower.

Octavia E. Butler was an award-winning African American science fiction author who pioneered the feminist dystopian genre. In 1993, she wrote the first of two books in the “Earthseed” series, which has recently enjoyed a resurgence, partly due to its prophetic nature. Set in the year 2024, the dystopian classic recounts the life of a 15-year-old black girl named Lauren Olamina, who struggles to survive “the Pox,” a sort of slang for the apocalypse. The setting is eerily similar to today. Climate change has brought drought and rising seawater. Middle-class families live in gated neighborhoods, fending off the homeless with borders and violence. Wildfires are commonplace. Public schools and whole cities are privatized. There’s even a Presidential candidate named Christoph Donner who is elected on the promise of dismantling wasteful government programs and whose campaign slogan is, no joke, “Make America Great Again.”

The books are a harrowing read. At the time of publication, the novels were categorized as dystopian fiction, but Butler’s self-labeled them as “speculative fiction.” Despite the cultural warnings, they are also incredibly hopeful due to the attitude and beliefs of the main character. Lauren is a wise bad ass. She recognizes that people have the ability to impact change and that the current culture is stuck in the past. In order to survive, she knows she must adapt and equips herself to survive in the future. She practices shooting. She collects maps and books on how Native Americans used plants. She even develops her own spiritual practice and spawns a new religion called Earthseed. Throughout the book we watch as Lauren writes scriptures in the “Book of the Living,” where she describes the one irresistible force in the universe: change.

All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.

Octavia Butler died unexpectedly of a stroke in 2006 at the age of 58. Her body was laid to rest in a cemetery in Altadena, California, the town in which she grew up. The same town that was ravaged by the L.A. fires earlier this year. While the cemetery burned, her grave, which is etched with the quote above, remained whole.

I have been thinking about Octavia Butler a lot lately. Recent political events in the United States, dominated by billionaire tech CEOs, have felt like the beginnings of our own apocalyptic chaos. What exactly does the future hold for us, and how might we learn from Lauren’s attitude towards change?

According to Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute, the change has just begun. Amy is a futurist. Yes, that’s a real job. Futurists are smart statisticians who study massive data trends to make predictions about the future. Amy claims we are in the middle of a technology supercycle and about to move into a new wave of innovation called The Era of Living Intelligence. She argues that AI is only one-third of the technological puzzle that’s about to take shape. The other two pieces are advanced censors and biotechnology. Soon, the convergence of these three technologies will underpin a new reality where systems can sense, learn, adapt, and evolve on their own.

Imagine this. Modern technologies like computer chips, batteries, and solar panels have all been possible, in part because of the discovery of inorganic crystals which are used in their manufacturing. The crystals must be stable, and until recently, scientists had to do painstaking experimentations for each crystal to determine its stability, which took months or years. Then, scientists and engineers at Google Deep Mind teamed up and created a tool called Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME). It combines science experimentation and AI to predict the stability of new inorganic materials. In a very short time (less than 2 years), they have discovered 2.2 million new crystals—equivalent to nearly 800 years worth of experimental knowledge. The materials have the potential to build wild things, like a building made of materials that can autonomously self-regulate temperature, light, and ventilation— without a computer (or a human) in the loop.

If this all feels stressful, don’t worry; you’re not alone. Human brains, unlike AI, are not designed to handle this level of rapid change, according to Dr. David Rock, a neuroscientist at the NeroLeadership Institute. He explains, “The network of the brain that is involved in noticing changes and deciding what to do—the prefrontal cortex—is one of the most energy-demanding, easily tired and easily overwhelmed parts of the brain. Changing how we do even the simplest of tasks is a very complex process.” When the prefrontal cortex is overworked, it sends a signal to the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for our flight-or-fight reaction. Thus, too much change can make us stressed out.

One way to ease the stress is to first acknowledge that the pace of change is causing the tension and then break it down into more manageable parts. In 1960, David Gleicher came up with a formula to help organize and manage change.

(dissatisfaction with current state) X (vision of desired future) X (first steps toward vision) > (resistance to change)

Essentially, we can overcome resistance to change by acknowledging we are dissatisfied with something, envisioning an alternative, and then outlining the first steps needed to reach the new vision.

To me, the reason this moment feels like the beginning of an apocalyptic future is that the dominant force driving these technological innovations is a vision for profits by corporate CEOs, not a vision for the well-being of humanity by the mass public. While a growing percentage of the population is actively showing their dissatisfaction with the current state, resistance without a new vision is not a formula for change.

To usher in the future that we want, we first need to imagine it. We must stop peddling crisis and critique and instead learn from the prophetic wisdom of Octavia Butler. Good or bad, the future will arrive through change. How quickly we can articulate the positive outcomes we want through a shared vision may be the difference between reality and science fiction.

“Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.” Parable of the Sower