“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”
According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models.
The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “superthreats,” which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks.
“Each superthreat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five superthreats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”
GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”
GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the superthreats.
We chose an intentionally provocative starting point for the scenario for several reasons. First, we wanted players to propose awe-inspiring solutions. So we had to pose a scenario that would inspire a sense of awe and wonder—an epic “What if?” What would you do if you woke up one morning to discover that the world’s most trusted supercomputer had calculated the entire human species was as endangered as tigers, polar bears, and pandas are today?
Second, we wanted to learn something new, so we had to push our players to imagine previously unthinkable ideas. We aimed to create a forecasting context so far from their ordinary day-to-day concerns that they would feel free to practice extreme creativity and be comfortable pitching “outlier,” or unexpected, ideas.
And third, we wanted to give our players a clear goal, a way to measure their success in the game. The GEAS survival horizon gave us the perfect way to do both. We would challenge our players to work together to extend the survival horizon from the year 2042 as far as we could possibly take it. Each year they added to the horizon would represent a significant milestone in the game. (Advances in the survival horizon would be based on an algorithm factoring in the number of active players, how many game missions they completed, and how many achievements they unlocked.)
To ground the game in some specific forecasting topics, we identified five key areas in which players could make a significant impact on our survival horizon. These were the five superthreats, extreme-scale challenges that posed the greatest threat to humanity’s survival. But they weren’t just threats—they were also opportunities, key areas for coordinated effort and innovation, among organizations and SEHIs alike.
If you wanted to make a difference in our game world of 2019, you had to pick one of these superthreats and start tackling it with the biggest, most surprising ideas you could come up with. These were the five superthreats:• Quarantine covers the global response to declining health and pandemic disease, including the current respiratory distress syndrome (ReDS) crisis. The challenge: How can we protect and improve our global health, especially in the face of pandemics?
• Ravenous focuses on the imminent collapse of the global food system, leading to food safety lapses and shortages worldwide. The challenge: How can we feed ourselves in more sustainable and secure ways?
• Power Struggle follows the tremendous political and economic upheaval, as well as quality-of-life disruptions, we may suffer as we attempt to move from oil-based societies to solar, wind, and biofuel societies. The challenge: How can we reinvent the way we create and consume energy?
• Outlaw Planet tracks the efforts to hack, grief, terrorize, or otherwise exploit the communications, sensor, and data networks we increasingly rely on to run our lives. The challenge: How can we be more secure in a globally networked society?
• Generation Exile looks at the difficulties of organizing society and government in the face of one particular challenge: the disappearance of secure habitats for three hundred million refugees and migrants, who have been forced to leave their homes and in many cases their homelands due to climate change, economic disruption, and war. The challenge: How can we govern ourselves and take better care of each other across traditional geopolitical borders?
To help players quickly grasp the details of this complex scenario, for each of these superthreats we created a short video trailer and a series of news headlines describing unfolding events. We also released an online report, set in the year 2019, outlining some of the dilemmas each of these superthreats might provoke, and how they might interact with and magnify each other. In the report, we emphasized a sense of optimism about humanity’s ability to overcome the superthreats.
The human species has a long history of overcoming tremendous obstacles, often coming out stronger than before. Indeed, some anthropologists argue that human intelligence emerged as the consequence of the last major ice age, a period of enormous environmental stress demanding flexibility, foresight, and creativity on the part of the small numbers of early Homo sapiens. Historically, those who have prophesied doom for human civilization have been proven wrong, time and again, by the capacity of our species to both adapt to and transform our conditions.
GEAS does not argue or believe that this future is unavoidable. This is perhaps the most important element of our forecast. This is not fate. If we act now—and act with intelligence, flexibility, foresight, and creativity—we can avoid the final threat. We may even come out of this period far stronger than we were before.
Both the report and the trailers ended with the same call to action: Join us to invent the future of the human species. We announced that volunteers were gathering on an online social network site called Superstruct. And we issued a public invitation—on blogs, on Facebook, on e-mail, on Twitter—to join the network. Our core message: Everyone has a part to play in reinventing the way the world works. And in the end, we attracted 8,647 super-empowered hopeful individuals to contribute their best ideas for the future to our superstructing experiment.
But before they tackled the superthreats, our players had an important first mission: invent their future selves.
Like any present-day social network, our 2019 social network asked you to fill out a personal profile. But our profile was different: it focused on survivability . What are the specific skills, resources, and communities you can bring to bear on these superthreats? What are you uniquely qualified to contribute to reinventing the world? We encouraged players to have fun imagining their future selves, but we also told them to keep it real. This was essential. Don’t invent a fictional character, we told them. This is about real play, not role play. We want to know who you really think you might be in 2019. Feel free to dream big, but make sure it’s grounded in reality.
Here’s the profile. How would you answer these questions? Remember: It’s not who you are today. It’s who you might be in the future.
YOUR WORLD IN 2019
Where do you live?
Who do you live with?
What do you do? Where do you work?
What matters to you most?
How did you get to be this person? Was there a particular turning point for you in the past ten years?
YOUR UNIQUE STRENGTHS
What do you know more about than most people? Tell us about your skills and abilities.
Who do you know? Tell us about the communities and groups you belong to, and what kinds of people are in your social and professional networks.
This first mission helped immerse players in the future. It required them to vividly imagine the year 2019, and how their work and lives m
ight be different by then. It also helped them identify specific personal resources they could bring to bear on the superthreats. At heart, Superstruct was about figuring out new roles for individuals, organizations, and communities to play in much bigger, longer-term efforts to make life on this planet better. To accomplish this goal, we had to help our players make direct connections between their current skills, resources, and abilities and the demands of the future.
If you were to ask an ordinary person if they could personally fix the economy, stop a pandemic, or prevent famine, they probably wouldn’t even know where to begin. So we gave the players a specific place to start: in their own communities, groups, and social networks, using whatever they knew best as a foundation for suggesting solutions.
Finally, this mission gave us some concrete data about our players. We asked players to tell us, confidentially, a little bit about who they were in 2008, to help us put their forecasts and ideas into context. This 2008 data didn’t appear on their public profile; it was only to help during the research process, so we could cross-reference their future ideas by real-life age, location, and occupation. We wanted to find out more about how SEHIs think of themselves and what kinds of projects they are most likely to tackle.
So who superstructs? Here’s what we found out.
Out of just under nine thousand forecasters who joined the effort, the vast majority were between the ages of twenty and forty, with the rest spread out like a bell curve. Our youngest player was ten (he was particularly interested in the future of food, especially “lab-grown meat,” which is in fact an emerging food technology). Our oldest player was ninety (she was interested in the future of education).
We had players from forty-nine out of fifty U.S. states and more than one hundred countries worldwide. We had a startlingly diverse group of professionals, including chief engineers, chief technical officers, chief creative officers; longshoremen, hotel concierges, and museum curators; astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, mathematicians; nurses, plumbers, and photographers. There were also numerous college and graduate students, senior executives, members of the armed forces, and public servants.
What expertise did these diverse participants bring to the game? Players identified expertise in areas as wide as labor activism, transportation and logistics, and robotics; specialty coffee, the comic book industry, the steel industry; immigration, forestry, and fashion; tourism, health care, and journalism ; chemical engineering, caregiving, and e-commerce; consulting, defense, and human resources; forensics, human rights, and nanotechnology.26
These were among the skills and resources we asked players to bring to bear on the five superthreats. And we asked them to tackle the superthreats in a very specific way: by inventing superstructures.
HOW TO INVENT A SUPERSTRUCTURE
This is a game of survival, and we need you to survive.
We’re facing superthreats, and we need to adapt.
The existing structures of human civilization just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.
You can help. Superstruct now. It’s your legacy to the human race.
Q: WHAT’S A SUPERSTRUCTURE?
A: A superstructure is a highly collaborative network that’s built on top of existing groups and organizations.
THERE ARE FOUR TRAITS THAT DEFINE A SUPERSTRUCTURE: 1. A superstructure brings together two or more different communities that don’t already work together.
2. A superstructure is designed to help solve a big, complex problem that no single existing organization can solve alone.
3. A superstructure harnesses the unique resources, skills, and activities of each of its subgroups. Everyone contributes something different, and together they create a solution.
4. A superstructure is fundamentally new. It should sound like an idea that no one’s tried before.
Q: WHAT KINDS OF GROUPS CAN COME TOGETHER TO FORM SUPERSTRUCTURES?
A: Any kind of group at all. For profit and not-for-profit, professional and amateur, local and global, religious and secular, online and offline, fun and serious, big and small.
ANY EXISTING COMMUNITY CAN BE ADDED TO A SUPERSTRUCTURE ! HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLES: • Companies
• Families
• People who live in the same building or neighborhood
• Industry and trade organizations
• Nonprofits and NGOs
• Annual conferences or festivals
• Churches
• Local or national governments
• Online communities
• Social network groups
• Fan groups
• Clubs
• Teams
Q: HOW DO I CREATE A NEW SUPERSTRUCTURE?
A: Start by picking a community that you already belong to. What could your community uniquely contribute to solving one or more of the superthreats? And who else do you want to work with to make it happen?
When you’re ready to share your idea, create a new wiki article. Use the wiki fields (name, motto, mission, who we need, how we work, and what we can accomplish) to describe your new superstructure.
Q: I’VE MADE A SUPERSTRUCTURE. WHAT NEXT?
A: When you have a basic description of your superstructure in place, invite other SEHIs and your own friends, colleagues, neighbors, and networks to join.
If you’ve made your superstructure public, keep an eye on your wiki to welcome new members and to see how the superstructure evolves. If you’ve made your superstructure private, be sure to check back often to approve new members so they can help you build your superstructure.
Together, your Superstruct members can keep editing the wiki until it describes exactly the way you think your superstructure should work.
DON’T STOP NOW!
Once you’ve created your first superstructure, there’s lots more to do. You can create superstructures for other superthreats. Or you can design spin-off superstructures from your original superstructure. You can invent competing superstructures, or bigger superstructures to swallow up superstructures that are already existing.
Keep superstructing, and surprise us with your big ideas!
The most important rule for inventing a superstructure was that it should be unlike any existing organization. It should be a fundamentally new combination of people, skills, and scales of work. But it also had to be a plausible approach to a problem—a way to give people who don’t ordinarily work on challenges like hunger, pandemic, climate change, economic collapse, or network security a way to make a difference.
Inventing a superstructure was the core element of gameplay; it was how players earned survivability points (up to one hundred), which tallied into a total survivability score. The more thoughtful, clearly explained, creative, and surprising the superstructure, the more points a player earned. A player could also earn points by joining and contributing ideas to other players’ superstructures.
What, exactly, is a survivability score? We described it to players as follows:Your Survivability Score is a number between 0 and 100 that appears in your Survival Profile. When you first join, you have a score of 0. Any score higher than 0 means you personally are becoming more and more important to the survival of the species. If you achieve a score of 100, you personally are absolutely central to the future of the human race.
In other words, our scoring system wasn’t meant to be competitive, but simply to represent your personal progress.
Let’s take a look at some brief descriptions of some of the particularly high-scoring superstructures, and the SEHIs who created them.
WE HAVE THE POWER—ENERGY - HARVESTING CLOTHES
You don’t need to buy power from an energy company. You can make your own power. What you wear every day can help you collect and save energy, which you can use to power your laptop, your cell phone, your MP3 player, or to provide heat.
Think: Jackets with solar panels that collect energy and can be used to provide elec
tric heat when you wear the jacket at night. Headbands with solar-paneled flowers that collect the energy you need to power your iPod. Fringed skirts that harness wind energy and store it in a tiny battery that you can detach and use to power anything at all. A belt with a sound wave collector that turns environmental noise into an energy source.
We’re creating and collecting designs for all kinds of wearable energy sources. We’ll make working prototypes of these designs and present them in a We Have the Power fashion show. We need your help sharing and improving these designs so that as many people as possible can harvest their own energy.
The We Have the Power superstructure was founded by SEHI Solspire, or, in real life, Pauline Sameshima, an assistant professor in the department of teaching and learning at Washington State University. She led her design class in creating a series of real, working prototypes and impromptu campus fashion shows for clothes that incorporated the kinds of wearable energy technologies described above. Their SEHI mission: to use rapid prototyping and design innovation to tackle the Power Struggle superthreat, and help invent the future of energy.
SEEDS ATMS—WITHDRAW YOUR FOOD FOR FREE
Food shouldn’t cost anything. Seeds also shouldn’t cost anything.
That’s why this superstructure has been created: to build a Seeds ATM network, so anyone who needs seeds can easily go to an ATM and get free seeds.
What we want to accomplish: spread the GYO (grow your own) food concept, as well as set the foundations of a bigger free-food network.
We envision a network of secure Seeds ATMs installed at bank locations worldwide. However, as a working prototype, we propose a really simple hack: gumball machines. We will fill them with seeds and set them to not need money, or to simply require a penny. We will install them outside grocery stores and farmers’ markets.
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Page 35