Bright Swans: Hopeful Scenarios for Bleak Futures
Sometimes a difficult present leads to unexpected positive futures
Thank you to students in New York University’s Future of Media classes, Summer and Fall 2021 (the Interactive Telecommunications Program), for elements of these scenarios adapted from their final presentations.
Since 2015 or so, humanity has been spiralling down in several directions at once: The pandemic (with mutating viruses), geopolitics (global conflicts between autocracy and democracy), US culture wars (potentially leading to civil war), inflation (economic shock and depression), technology (AI moving beyond the ability to constrain it), and climate change (overshooting the bounds of civilization-friendly temperature by 2050). Worse still, all these trends seem to exacerbate each other. Nobody knows exactly how dire things are, but rose-colored views of the future seem less and less likely to be realized.
Some hopeful scenarios exist. They are plausible. But they aren’t likely to happen in the way people might expect.
They are “bright swan” scenarios. They’re a form of black swan scenarios, a phrase popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Black swans are rare, unexpected events with extreme impact; coming from out of nowhere. We might understand how they happened to occur, but they’re very difficult to predict…
