Seven Alternative Timelines of the Future, provided by TED

An exciting set of seven videos from TED, both utopian and dystopian, of largely technological futures. It begins with Superflux's (and London's) Anab Jain (embedded above) and moves through the rest of these links:

• Sci-fi stories that imagine a future Africa 
• We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads 
• What would happen if we upload our brains to computers?   
• What a driverless world could look like  
• How AI can enhance our memory, work and social lives   
• Can we build AI without losing control over it?

Anab Jain sets out your reasons for watching:

Today it can feel like things are happening too fast -- so fast, that it can become really difficultfor us to form an understanding of our place in history. It creates an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and anxiety, and so, we let the future just happen to us. We don't connect with that future "us." We treat our future selves as a stranger, and the future as a foreign land. It's not a foreign land; it's unfolding right in front of us, continually being shaped by our actions today. We are that future, and so I believe fighting for a future we want is more urgent and necessary than ever before...

...Creating concrete experiences [of the future] can bridge the disconnect between today and tomorrow. By putting ourselves into different possible futures, by becoming open and willingto embrace the uncertainty and discomfort that such an act can bring, we have the opportunity to imagine new possibilities. We can find optimistic futures; we can find paths forward; we can move beyond hope into action. It means we have the chance to change direction, a chance to have our voices heard, a chance to write ourselves into a future we want. Other worlds are possible.

We are interested in using this approach in our political laboratories (or "collaboratories" / collabs, as we're beginning to call them). Watch this space.