In the last blog, we introduced scenario planning as an established academic and business practice for framing the future. The practice helps us break out of fixed thought patterns and step into a growth mentality that envisions multiple options for the future. The first step in this scenario planning journey is to pick the most important macro drivers that will define the parameters of the future. There are many options here such as economics, climate, geopolitics, technology, or social change. Before we get there, some preliminary thoughts on how we got here are in order.
Preparing to Imagine
At AI Theology we are in the business of imagining the future. In fact, in our recent meetings we established our mission statement as the following:
To forge a community of lifelong learners who will imagine theological AI futures that promote the flourishing of all life.
AI Theology mission statement
That is, we are above all a lifelong learning community. We look at the future with an open mind and stare at it as an organism rather than an individual. We believe we hear God better when we do it together. By expanding the table of conversation, including voices once shut out, we can finally hear the Spirit’s whisper from the margins.
Yet, we also have centered our task, our work to do, on imagination. What? You read that right, our number 1 job is child’s play – the skill we unlearn with adulthood. We believe that imagination is one way we can express the indwelling divine breath into form. As a form of embodied creativity, just like faith, imagination brings forth what was not there before.
Scenario Planning as the Scaffold for Creativity
As you may suspect, our goal in pursuing scenario planning is not for the survival or thriving of an institution, instead, it is creative. We seek to imagine futures based on these scenarios we come up with. Furthermore, we seek to express them through relatable stories and through explanatory prose.
Our goal is not to create strategic plans but to elicit inspiration and action towards preferred collective futures. One of the biggest failures of technological development and theological thinking in our time is one of imagination. Straightjacketed by rigid religious dogma or agendas seeking perpetual profit, we produce more of the same even as needs and capabilities change. The failure of imagination is what leads us back into reclaiming a lost past rather than building a future anew. In this journey of transformation, we must first awaken to imagination.
Yet, this is not a free-flowing process devoid of structure and order. Discipline and creativity are not opposites but instead can work together to forge masterpieces. Hence, in the spirit of integration, we look to business practices, often tied to profit-making objectives, and turn them into a platform to build dreams about the future. In our case, we believe this will take shape in the form of fiction and non-fiction content about the future. We want to engage in scenario planning for painting realistic pictures of what the future could look like.
Setting the Foundations of a Future Canvas
If we are serious about imagining the future with the help of scenario planning, the first step is deciding on two main variables that will decide the parameters for our future. I would like to call them “macro-drivers” of the future. They are general enough to cut across multiple areas but also intelligible enough to be understood in simple terms. They don’t cover all areas of life but are big enough to set the terms upon which humanity builds their future.
For example, while one may not have foreseen in the early 1900s, growing nationalism would set the terms for the rest of the century. In the previous century, industrialization and colonization were defining macro drivers. These are not events but more like themes. They capture the gestalt of an age.
If we look at our present and the near-term future (20 years from now), which macro-drivers are setting the terms for what is to come? You may have guessed it but after some deliberation, we are currently settling on climate change and geopolitics. While these are important now, we expect them to become all the more defining in the next two decades.
The Climate Wager
Human driving warming of the earth is undoubtedly the challenge of our times. This is a pressing issue now and is only expected to loom larger in our collective psyche. It is an interesting variable because it is not dependent on a few actors, like political leaders, but represents the compounded effect of our relationship with the more-than-human world. It depends on us but also on how nature reacts. Both sides are extremely hard to predict but we can at least make scenarios based on agreed-upon temperature markers.
You might have heard about the 1.5C challenge nations put forth as a threshold they would like the planet to stay in by 2100. What you may not know is that we are already at 1.1 and at a rate of 0.2 warming per decade, we would reach this temperature by the early 2040s. That is, the goal for 2100 may come 40-50 years earlier! Naturally, when thinking about scenarios on climate, one of them see the earth reaching 1.5 or even 1.7 in 20 years – the pessimistic scenario. On the other end, would be to trust that changes implemented now will accelerate to curb that to something more like 1.3C. The variation seems small but it makes all the difference.
Climate change represents a marker and metric of how well humanity works with the earth to sustain life. Given the multiple warnings from scientists and the challenges we are already experiencing, I believe climate must be part of every exercise considering the future. It is the container, the stage setting the conditions in which we will live (or not) our future lives.
Globalism vs Nationalism
Geopolitics is another macro-driver of the future. It represents the combined impact of national political decisions. One could say that geopolitics will be a by-product of climate impact. There is some truth to that, especially over the long term. However, in this case, the macro-driver really is how nations cooperate with each other to face planetary challenges. That is, will they seek to work together toward shared goals (globalism) or prefer to protect their own interests first (nationalism).
A recent example would be COVID-19. On that occasion, national responses leaned mostly toward globalism. There was unprecedented sharing of information, vaccines, and cooperation as a way to mitigate the worse of the pandemic. Even with the significant cost in human lives, globalism ensured worst scenarios did not occur. This is, however, not a guarantee for the next two decades.
The Economist published a seminal article, The New Political Divide in 2016 that expressed this choice well. It argued that the central political question would no longer be between left and right (capitalism vs socialism) but between open and closed societies. This was a remarkable statement considering that it preceded Trump’s electoral victory and the rise of nationalists in other countries such as Brazil and the Philippines. This debate is far from over and it would be a mistake to interpret Trump’s defeat in 2020 as a decline of nationalism in geopolitics. Political candidates may change but the allure of isolationism and parochial politics will continue
Conclusion
There are many others but we thought we would start with these two to set the canvas for the stories we are to create. As we mentioned before, the point here is not to “get the future right.” We are not just extending these trends to build one future. Instead, we are looking at them for a range. That is, what would it look like if we actually are able to slow global warming? What does it look like if it accelerates? How will a nationalistic world look? What happens if globalism reigns supreme? We believe the future will lie somewhere in between these ranges, yet preparing for its extremes is a good strategy.
While our focus is on the future AI and faith, we believe that climate change and geopolitics will be defining parameters. Think of it as a canvas, the prevailing background upon which the future of AI and faith will be painted. By doing so, we acknowledge that technology and religion do not happen in a vacuum but are as much drivers as recipients of their surroundings.
