How to Think About the Future (Part 3): Uphill Futures in a Downhill World | Frankly 145

**Nate Hagens** (0:12)
Good morning. This is part three of How to Think About the Future, where I'm going to talk about how to build a systems terrain map of the various pathways to various futures.
I keep making this series longer, because as most of you tuning in here feel, we're approaching a really serious juncture in our global economic situation and our culture.
And I really want more people to be able to visualize, discuss, and engage with all the unknowns steering towards life and continuity and away from dystopia. Though some dystopian things are probably now baked in, indeed are happening now.
So, a quick recap so far. In part one, we talked about how to hold the future as a landscape of possibilities, coupled systems and phase shifts and shortfall risks.
In part two, we built four grids of variables that will be core components in shaping the future. Economic direction, up or down, power and distribution, geopolitics, and earth systems. And we highlighted why technology is neither good nor bad, but an amplifier of whatever system it sits inside. In part four, the next video, I'm going to combine sections of those four grids into composite worlds, specific futures descriptive enough that you can feel the difference between what it might be for us to live inside one versus another. But before I do that, I decided to add one more conceptual tool, because those composites I'm going to build are not only just a list of possible futures sitting side by side with equal likelihood. They all will reside in a landscape, and the shape of that landscape, which valleys are deep and which ridges are steep and hard to cross, and which directions flow downhill or uphill from where we stand right now, I think matters enormously to understand which futures were most likely to arrive at if we do nothing and what it will take to climb towards the futures we want.
So all these concepts come from biology and ecology and are, in my opinion, pretty useful for thinking about where human civilization might be headed. Okay, so here's the biology. In the 1950s, a developmental biologist named Conrad Waddington was trying to understand how a single cell, a fertilized egg, becomes eventually an entire organism. Every cell in your body carries the same DNA. They start from the same place on the map, if you will. But a heart cell and a liver cell and a brain neuron end up as completely different things. How does a cell that starts with all the possibilities open to it end up committed to one specific pathway? Waddington imagined all this as a landscape. Picture a ball sitting at the top of a series of rolling hills and valleys. That ball is a stem cell, and it has the potential to become many different things. As it develops, it rolls. It rolls downhill and enters a valley. And in that valley, there's a fork. And the cell enters one branch after that fork, and then that branch forks again. At each fork, some of what was previously possible to that cell closes off. And by the time it reaches the bottom of a particular valley, it is now committed to being, for instance, a heart cell. It will never again be a stem cell. Nor will it become any other type of cell, at least not without extraordinary intervention. The valleys there are not all the same depth or size. Some are deep and have very steep walls. And once a cell enters, it stays because the constraints to leave are quite strong. Some valleys are quite shallow. A small perturbation or some chemical signal or a mutation might push the cell out and into a neighboring valley. And the ridges between those valleys also vary in height. Some transitions between cell states are relatively easy. Others would require enormous energy or very specific conditions that rarely occur naturally. I think this way of looking at a situation with valleys and ridges and mountains is useful because, you guessed it, I think it maps directly on to human civilizational futures. When we imagine and discuss and work towards various futures, we're not choosing from a list of possible futures the way you would choose from a Chinese restaurant menu, where everything is equally available, and the only question is your preference. We're also not sitting at the top of a series of rolling hills and valleys like our imagined cell. We're already rolling through a moving landscape with a shifting topography. And some futures, I would argue most futures, are downhill from where we currently are. Some are uphill, and by downhill, I mean the path of least resistance. The future that current momentum and present incentives already favor. The one that takes the least new energy or coordination to reach, those are downhill. Uphill futures are the ones that require sustained effort to climb towards and sustained effort to stay in once we arrive there. And once we find ourselves deep in a particular valley, the high walls constrain the possible next moves.