re:publica 2024: Florence Gaub - Zukunft - Eine Bedienungsanleitung [english translation]

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right hello everyone I flew in from Rome today just for you and in Rome the weather is a bit better but that's always the case I guess so why am I here today I wanted to start with a quick um survey in the room please raise your hand if you agree to the following sentence the future of Germany and the world I'm quite pessimistic about it almost everyone and maybe the ones who didn't didn't understand the question right all right please please raise your hand if you agree to the statement my own future I'm quite optimistic about that almost everyone well so we can already see maybe it's a bit more complex thinking about Futures and the reason I wrote this book you know most of us think about you know future is something something that just happens to us like a a comet you know um what's the word uh meteorite um you know it's it's something that happens and we can't influence it we we can't prevent it but it's a fact that future is something you know we're thinking about now it's here now future is what we think about today and so you know most people are like oh maybe uh there's a German Minister here um this evening uh the you know the climate of the world and our own little future you know it's disconnected from that but really it's all like um stacked within each other like Russian dolls and that's why I wrote this book because you don't need someone to tell you it's not going to be as bad as you think it will be but you need to understand that we all have this capacity in our brain to think about future today and so I thought about um you know instruction manuals for uh a vacuum um and I'm going to write a book just in that style um I don't know if you read instruction manuals I don't usually but now I wrote one myself it's a bit absurd but oh well and so an instruction manual tells you how to handle something right and so at the end of this talk I want to give you the the ability to have a the feeling of being able to influence the the future to actually handle it and to not just think about it as something that will happen to you and so why do people why do humans have the ability to imagine something that's not here yet that doesn't exist yet and maybe will never exist what is it made of how do you how do you handle it and what do you do if it's broken and I think a lot of us uh feel like the future's broken so what is the future most people think well it's you know always been the same uh people think about stuff that might happen but when we look at history we see that the human imagination um about future has really changed and shifted quite a lot so the old Romans and the old Greeks um they had a very different conception of that so you know the Oracle of dely right um where the sort of future you know they thought of the world as being influenced by gods gods that were just the same as humans with emot emotions irrationality and there really nothing ordinary people can do to influence that and maybe you can like sort of understand what's happening but you cannot influence it at all so for example um the story of idus uh he you know uh there's this Oracle saying right that he will marry his mother and kill his father so they send him away and then he returns as an adult he doesn't know who his father is he kills him and he marries his mother because he doesn't know she's his mother and so this is that's sort of emblematic of this ancient idea of uh future there's you know there's no responsibility for the future there's you're just like you have to deal with what comes your way and so left and right uh you can see um the final judgment right um uh in Hinduism Buddhism uh Christianity uh some forms of Judaism and almost every major religion that we know today they institutionalize responsibility the concept of responsibility the what my actions today I will be held responsible for them in the future and that's revolutionary in comparison to the ancient Greek and Roman ideal and so it's something where you can do something about the future and where you ought to do something about the future and that's a crucial moment to the history of humanity because we have this understanding of future as something where responsible for which we can influence where we understand if I do a then B might happen and that only happened in the uh 17th and 18th century with the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution uh the discovery of um how pregnancy Works gravity and all of that really only started uh in the 18th century and so this concept of future that we have today that we live with today that's not as old as you might think and um we have this uh future cone it's a very um popular tool in our in our line of work we're here and ahead of us there are lots and lots of possible Futures and that's that's the thing about future there's not one single future there are lots and lots of possible Futures like at any point in time there are even a thousand Futures present in this room not not only about um climate change all of you can think of multitudes of possible Futures where you're going to go on holiday what you're going to have for dinner all of these are Futures and only one of these Futures is going to happen in the end that's one of the reasons why future is overwhelming because there are so many Futures and we don't know which is actually going to apply and of course in the center we have the projected future the business as usual future we like to say that it's never been as bad as it is now the future is uncertain that's not true it's not true because each and every one of us is born with what we call a life expectancy today so the concept that I can be born and be expect to live until 80 I can look at my phone and uh find out what the weather is going to be like if I'm involved in a legal in a in a legal proceeding I know what the the law is what what I'm trying to get at is our ancestors and somebody who lived in Berlin 100 150 years ago had a lot less certainty than we have but we have more more knowledge more certainty about what's going to happen we don't live in a time of high uncertainty I I like to say that we live in a time of high certainty and that makes us allergic to everything we can't predict it's over regulated and we have an overreaction to everything we don't understand these are the outer borders of the future preposterous very unlikely to happen possible plausible and so on but the most important thing is that the Futures are can be distinguished by distance am I going to make my flight that's that's one very small future but it's it's a future probability and influence and um the the difference between the first and the second question is influence most people think that they can influence their own future not everything of course not all of it but a lot of it but you can you can influence your own future more than the future of germanism germanies and that's that correlates with pessimism it's a historical fact I I've looked at studies from the ' 80s '90s early 2000s and people like to say everything used to be better but that's not true Germans were afraid of different things but they were afraid I don't want to talk down these problems but it's it's normal to be afraid of the things you can't influence and then we have the four categories of future like Russian nesting dolls the small future is called every day most of us don't um don't consider what they're going to have for breakfast and you every day then the projects of Our Lives the project projects of humanity these are well this used to be dominated by religions today due to climate change it's also part of a political debate but why do we have this we're born with this incredible ability to imagine so many things each and every one of us yeah was um lying awake at night and thinking about these worst case scenarios my my sister isn't coming home did she get run over by a car did I forget to turn off the coffee machine at work and it never turned out as bad as we imagined so why do we have these Futures there's this interesting approach um that says that what we like to call ourselves Homo sapiens but we're probably we should be called homo Prospectors so the human who thinks about the future because we that's what we spend most of our time on not necessarily the big futures during the day humans spend most of the times thinking about the future and even when we think about the past it's mostly because we're interested in its implications for the future so we're obsessed with future because most of the things that make us human depend on that ability Being Human means making decisions and thankfully in the 21st century we can we can make a lot of decisions we can make decisions of so many kinds and but for that we need this future ability should I marry this person person or that person or no person at all and only since uh the age of brain scans we know that our brain shows the same amount of activity when considering the future as it does when it's when we think about something that we actually experienced it's like the hollow hollow deck in Star Trek which is constantly running and is taking a lot of our mental bandwidth so um considering all the possibilities what do I want to study who do I want to be where do I want to live all these things that the 21st century is giving us we couldn't we couldn't um profit from these if we didn't have the this future ability there's also handling uncertainty um this is the fun part of my talk um there is a study that asked people you can you you can either wait 10 minutes and um there's a 50% chance of getting an electric shock or do do you want an electric shock right now who of you would like an electric shock right now you're not crazy you're humans because people hate uncertainty people prefer a negative certainty to a possible negative uncertainty and being able to reduce those negative uncertainties that's what the future ability is for if if I wouldn't well and being human means having visions traveling somewhere wanting to experience or learn something not necessarily in this capitalist entertainment um idea but being in movement and one part of that is having a vision for where you want to be do I want to be a super Surfer for example you need future ability for all these things there are people who don't have this there are people with amnesia there's a patient who is lacking part of their brain they don't have shortterm memory but they also can't answer the question what are you going to do this Saturday so being human is defined by the this ability to think about the future yeah so like I said all of you possess this ability and it's very um it's great to have this capability right and so it's uh it happens on autopilot and we um put these items in it and so the first things first you have to turn on future and so our perception of time is like a car it's like a manual transmission car um you can't be in multiple gears at once you can't think about past present and future at once and so meditation is all about being in the present right um and yeah to think creatively about multiple things is not possible of course you can think about future while you're like cutting Tomatoes or something but you can think about future and present at once and how do you turn on future so to speak um well planning for once take a piece of paper and a pen and you think about oh I want to achieve this and that I want to go on vacation to France um and planning is it's hard work it's hard cognitive work who enjoys planning all right yeah of course I'm in Berlin so in Rome where I live I think the answer might have been a bit different U but the second thing is the second way to turn on the future is uh daydreaming and that contains the word dreaming and you can also use the English term mind wandering and that's I prefer that because you know it's like the mind is doing that on its own and you can't really do that actively right it's just sort of your mind does that but uh you have to have certain conditions for that to happen so if you use your smartphone look at that that you know prevents you from mind wandering um but if you're in the sort of like very um nice state of being then your mind can start to wonderand and you might you know get great ideas from that for example uh when you stare at the window on train or when you're listening to a boring talk and I really really uh recommend this to all of you to like you know have these conditions in your life to let your mind wander and so all of us put uh these three things into it to into this channel uh to think about future and of course you know it depends on our experiences on our past lives um yeah so the the personal history you know the history you absorb from friends family books TV without history there's no future why because this imaginary like movie that's running in your brain you need ideas to fuel that uh so for example you know have you talked to a four-year-old about future it's uh it's quite hard because four-year-olds don't know what is possible and so personal history is quite important um and people who are very creative when thinking about future those are people that had have a diverse friendship circles that read a lot that travel a lot and so on and the present is has this um yeah kind of a special role in relation to the Future because everything you feel in the present like sort of will limit your way to think about future for example alcohol drugs sex and so I'm not going to go into detail but you know I don't think a lot of people have uh thought about their Pension Plan while they were attending a party right because all these uh stimuli in the present you know you you you sort of um yeah when you when you drink too much at a party that's not your problem that's uh tomorrow Florence's problem and there's a term for that that's called future discounting so so we mostly think about how am I feeling today how am I feeling now how am I doing physically uh am I cold have I just did I just eat a cheeseburger and so uh yeah it's we don't yet know why fast food like sort of makes time go faster in our perception um but the important thing is new newness so for example uh if I if I showed you a SC movie and everything looked just the same as it does today you wouldn't say wow that's a sci-fi film because sci-fi is about difference it needs to be different from the present and that's Innovation that's something new creating something new and so future is always about something new that's not here yet and so for me and my work because I work at NATO uh you know that's that's a field of work where creativity is um uh the focus point but as an individual in uh companies um the most important thing to solve problems is creativity and so you mix these three points together experience present and Innovation and then you cast it away immediately you um create and project all of these Futures every day and then you discard them um yeah and so with this horror scenario you know like as soon as my sister arrives safely home and she didn't get run over by a car I immediately forget about the fear that I just had and this possible future I created and so what do we do with this we live in a time where not all four of these items are in balance and I think that's a reason why I wrote the book um a lot of people you know are so afraid of the future and so how do you deal with it differently and the first thing you do is you set aside what you know for sure so safety Securities is that the right word uh the sun will rise in the morning something like that what can we depend on and for us in our work where you think about future strategically you know what do I know for certain and what do I and what uh do I don't know and so the second one is managing risks some risks you can't eliminate completely but you have to manage them and in Germany uh you know we have insurance companies when we think about uh car crushes and something like that um but on a higher level you know there's always the possibility of something bad happening and you have to manage that actively and what's the great thing about that you immediately feel better you're less afraid because having a future and thinking about the future is always an active action um because if you just think about like these you know horror fearful scenarios um you you also need to come to a conclusion of what to do at the end you think about what do I know what could go wrong and what could go right in this space of possibility you know it's never just bad and it's never just good and so I did some research and in the 50s you know um when we look back we we um just we have just distortive view of the 50s of the 1950s um so in looking back you know people thought there would be a third world war it would be a nuclear war and the world would end but there was also this idea of um progression and so it was this mix of progression and Terror and just because you know we feel bad now when we think about the future it doesn't mean that it's going to get as bad as we expect and today we tend to forget that the future don't always has to be bad that there can be that positive things can happen if we work on it and the least popular point is the last one in Germany um you can try the to predict the future as much as you want there are always going to be surprises some of them are going to be good some are not when the pandemic started when the war started um people kept asking well who failed to predict this it's it's not possible to predict everything that's um what physics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us you you you can't predict the future not all of it not always there are three things you should not do wishful thinking and catastrophic thinking it's cousin both of these are both of these are dangerous wishful thinking is when you have when you think that a positive vision of the future has already happened football fans do this a lot there are studies that show that football fans are very bad at um predicting if their team is going to win um that's okay because football isn't critical but in the case of War it's it's um problematic if um you think that war can't happen then that's not the same as running an analysis and um and uh being optimistic about war um but catastrophic thinking is quite similar it starts from a point of thinking that the worst is unavoidable we don't need to act um and I'm showing you a picture of the last generation movement because even though I think that the this organization is following a goal that we all should follow preventing the climate crisis there is there is no study that shows that we are all going to die because of climate change the problem is that's what um catastrophic thinking does to you I have a person from uh Greek mythology for you Cassandra she could predict the future but people didn't take her seriously um when humans are overloaded with catastrophic thinking then they they stop stop acting a classic example of that is for example smoking if you if you tell people to to that smoke working is bad for them they're going if you overload them they're going to do the opposite um and then thirdly we have um certain assumptions and the then CEO of Microsoft who thought that the iPhone was never going to be successful my recommendation would be to ask yourself what would cause me to change my opinion um and have a mental high water mark that tells you that okay when this happens then I'm going to have to change my opinion mental agility is the secret weapon of future thinking can I find solutions to evaluate this space of possibilities can I find opportunity that I've overlooked how to repair it um find old Futures and let go of them all of all of us have had to do that um for example when a relationship ended when a dream was um was uh was over there's a certain amount of grief involved but that that um uh you can get through it some Futures regenerate on their own for example um broken relationships you don't have to do everything on your own most of these carry too much negativity there is a double negativity in climate change firstly everything is going to be terrible secondly unless you stop doing so this Narrative of loss so we have a double negative here but you need a positive aspect to engage you a positive counterbalance I was in Saudi Arabia last year where they're talking about climate change in this way hey it's not bad if we stop eating meat we're going to live healthier we're going to be more in balance with nature the air is going to improve there are going to be fewer illnesses and that's a story you can tell about climate change also in Germany but it's not happening and the other aspects have too little no novelty um that's typical of German politics when you look at what parties are proposing it's either a very negative future a return to the past or saying that tomorrow is going to be the same as today and that's not very sexy we all want to look forward to something to work towards some something even work hard but it has to be shown to us that's what science fiction is great at what can we do what what can you change there's no point in lying awake at night and thinking about something that you can't influence for example the end of humanity but there are small things that all of us can do finding the vision find something you you enjoy about the future you want to work towards learn to live with the negatives and don't be afraid of surprises so because Being Human always uh means change thank you very much [Music]