Ari Wallach has lived as a professional futurist for over 20 years. What does this imply?
“I work with truly gigantic organizations, largely helping them think about tomorrow – the distant tomorrows,” explains Wallach in the most recent episode of Selection “Strictly Business” podcast.
Wallach’s forward-looking mind is on display in the new PBS documentary series “A Transient Historical past of the Future,” premiering April 3 on PBS in the US. He hosts the series and is an executive producer for Kathryn Murdoch, Wendy Schmidt and DreamCrew, the production banner led by famous hip hop rapper Drake. Wallach and Murdoch are teammates at Futurific Studios, who make their debut with “Transient Historical Past”. The six-part sequence surveys inventors, entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and others seeking revolutionary solutions to a spread of social ills. Notable contributors include French President Emmanuel Macron, Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and famous French football star Kylian Mbappé.
Futurific Studios was founded with the unabashed purpose of developing content designed to promote constructive portrayals of the future. Murdoch, who is president and co-founder with her husband, James Murdoch, of the Quadrivian Foundation, calls this a “protopic” perspective and says she has been dismayed by the deficit of hope she has found in contemporary storytelling, significantly related to adult fiction. younger.
“For some reason, we stopped telling stories of hope. And we just tell the story about how terrible everything will be,” says Murdoch. “I once met with Ari, who is a true futurist, when we started talking about doing a show like this. It just seemed incredibly important at this moment.”
Wallach began noticing a few years ago that the time horizon for long-term business planning has shortened in recent years. Where 10- and 20-year terms were once the norm, he recently met with a government that was only prepared to wait six months. “I realized at that time that we had a problem,” says Wallach. “Because the problems we face as a species on planet Earth will not be solved in six months, nor have they arrived in the last six months.”
A key theme of “A Transitional History of the Future” is coming to grips with the new applied sciences that are driving the rapid pace of change.
“We all know that know-how alone shouldn’t be the answer,” says Murdoch. “We want social and political programs to work around these issues in an effort to make them work. What we needed to do was first point out that this is not even close to know-how. It’s also about making programs work, like our democracy, for example. But also just to make sure it’s not a binary of ‘AI is going to be horrible or ‘AI is going to be great. It’s really about taking a step back and thinking, ‘What do I want from this? What is the purpose of the final word? The place where we need to get to? After that, how would I take advantage of AI to try this? Or how will we practice AI to be superior?”
The Futurific partners are not naive – they understand that doomsday action thrillers are generally a more marketable product for Hollywood than a non-fiction deep dive into complex social and environmental issues. But the duo hopes that even the beginning of dialogue with Hollywood creatives will plant important seeds.
“We are often told by a society, ‘This is what failure looks like.’ I just went to the theater and watched sort of. But if you happen to keep pushing that button over and over again, ultimately we become numb and lose the imaginative power of what success really is. And that is part of the present and, in fact, the mission and mandate of Futurific Studios.”