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Also available on Medium and the TGFP blog.

In 1975, New York was a crime-ridden nearly bankrupt metropolis with garbage piling up on sidewalks. It certainly wasn't a tourist destination but more akin to the dark dystopian Gotham City that inspired the Batman movies.

In a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy, the city turned to President Gerald Ford -- who famously told the city to "drop dead". It was that bad. Now on its own, NYC had to find a way to flip the script and promote a more positive image. So it turned to Madison Avenue for help. Not surprisingly, most agencies passed thinking the city was too far gone.

Everyone except for two brave women, Mary Wells Lawrence who ran Well, Rich and Green Advertising and Jane Maas the real-life inspiration for Peggy Olson in "Mad Men", who set out to re-brand a city like a product.

The result was the famous "I Love New York" campaign which completely changed the city's story and bad reputation. Overnight, NYC became a tourist mecca.

Ten years later Chiat/Day, the Los Angeles ad agency I worked at, would orchestrate the same rebranding idea for its hometown. In the 1980s, L.A. was a smog-filled city with tense race relations - certainly not the food, fashion, and arts mecca it is today. The "I Love L.A." campaign featuring the Randy Newman song of the same name celebrated its unique neighbourhoods and cultural diversity helping to change it into the vibrant city we know today.
FLIPPING THE SCRIPT
We live in world shaped by our stories. The stories we tell reinforce our perceptions and shape our reality. Marketers know this. It's what a brand strategy is all about. We craft a brand story to trigger how a product is perceived and that becomes the brand identity. The two big filters that inform our perception are goals (dreams) and fears. Goals and fears are the essence of stories from a biologically and evolutionary perspective. They are also the essence of branding.

In the same way, the stories we tell reinforce and shape our culture and our future. If they amplify fears they exacerbate anxiety, worry, and uncertain mindsets. If they are positive, they trigger hope and inspiration.

Marketers also know how negative stories can erode trust fast. Australian business story expert, Shawn Callahan, explains that for every negative story you need a lot more positive ones to counteract its effects.

We now live in a time that some have called the golden age of dystopia. A continuous dose of fearful stories have created millennial preppers (a person who believes a catastrophic disaster is likely to occur in the future and makes active preparations for it) and other Armageddon mindsets. To overcome the impact of dystopian storytelling, we need to rebrand the future as though it were a product. Or in this case a product of our imagination. American futurist Barbara Hubbard would add, "As we see the future, so we act and as we act, so we become".

My friend and partner in the Good Future Project, Futurist Gerd Leonhard, talks about two possible future scenarios in his wonderful video entitled " Twice Upon a Time" (or the ' Good Future-Only ' edit), Leonhard theorizes that mistrusting the future makes it very hard to give up the past and the present which makes it difficult to move forward.

It's also important to factor in some neuroscience here. The brain tends to embellish and exaggerate fears and traumas. Like watching a film, the brain gets creative and fills in the blank frames of things we don't understand or are uncertain of. In fact, studies show that fifty percent of what we think or say about our past is made up. Which means you might actually be living a story that's not real.

What's more, we continually look for proof in order to confirm that story. It becomes our belief and behavior. If we feel like a victim, then we will look for ways to reinforce that belief. And these half-truths become our attitudes, perspectives, and our identity -- both individually and as a society. As historian Yuval Noah Harar i tells us, "Just as individual humans get caught up in the stories they invent about themselves so do entire societies, cultures, and nations.
TALE OF TWO FUTURES

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The famous opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities is based on the perception of the times. The best and the worst. It's an apt phrase to describe the context of where we are today. You might call it A Tale of Two Futures. So is it the best of times or the worst of times? Is it an age of incredible knowledge, amazing technological breakthroughs, and abundance? Or one of climate change hubris, global inequity, distorted social media, and unethical technology?

Of course, our modern world is unlike anything Dickens could have imagined. In the author's day, time was linear and local with everything a day's walk with a person's life typically marked by a few notable events. Today, everything is global and accelerating at massive exponential speed. It's an era I call VUCA MAX during which an estimated 250 years of change will take place in just ten years.

But Dickens also understood that the stories we tell create our future. ​In his writing, he approached technology with hope in its ability to magnify human power, to provoke dreams, and ignite spiritual meaning. ​He believed that technology's true utility set the future apart from the greed, the wastefulness, and the pollution of mainstream Victorian society.​

In fact, on a whole, the generations before us generally celebrated future progress with awe and wonder. Whereas today, people around the world question the future and even dread it. 70% of young people under 40 years of age feel humanity is doomed and more than three-quarters of adults (76%) feel the future of America is a significant source of stress. Never in human history has the future believed to be so uncertain.

But the fact is the world is getting better and better every year with a compounding effect creating what Kevin Kelly, founder or WIRED magazine, calls "A continual progress toward a better world or - Protopia". Protopia may not be as newsworthy as apocalyptic climate visions of cities underwater, burning rainforests, geopolitical shifts, disruptive markets, and social distrust but we are - as futurist Peter Leyden claims - really about to enter what could be a new age of Enlightenment. Not just mind-blowing technology but the kind of human evolutionary progress that will rival the Renaissance.

Indeed, the future is actually much better than we think (as Gerd says in this video).

Exponential converging technology is transforming scarcity and poverty into an age of abundance. Energy and water are becoming cheap, clean, and safe. As the cost of energy continues to drop, vertical farming and desalination will become commonplace further accelerating the eradication of hunger.

Ubiquitous AI and robotics are not replacing humans but expanding human potential, longevity, completely connecting the world, and accelerating innovation to solve the planet's greatest challenges. Billions of people around the world who once lacked access to quality education can now create positive change for their families and communities.
STORIES ARE A SELF-FULLFILLING PROPHECY
Today, Iceland has 100% renewable clean energy and a thriving eco-tourism business. There are seven times more tourists than locals. But, it wasn't always like this. In the 1970s, Iceland was dependent on imported coal and oil. To say the least, it was not a big tourist destination.

The change didn't happen overnight. But it started with a new story that Iceland could be a model for clean sustainable energy with the help of a profound and unified vision, huge adjustments, and realigned investments.

Change for the better can be uncomfortable. It can be frustrating and seem impossible. And it takes commitment. But ask Iceland if it's worth it.

Again, if you have the right story, you can rebrand a city, a country, and even a planet.
YOUR FUTURE SELF IS A STRANGER
"The future ain't what it used to be." Yogi Berra

Another reason you might be having such a hard time perceiving a positive future is because there's a stranger in it. And it's you!

Jane McGonigal a futurist at the Institute For The Future explains, "It's a neurological fact that when you think about yourself 10 years in the future, your brain treats the person that you're thinking about as someone you've never met".

Take a moment to imagine yourself in 2035. You'll probably see your future self as someone you don't know so, as a result, you don't think as much about the future as you should. This is why many put off saving or planning for retirement.

This is due to a glitch in our medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that tells you the story of who you are. But if that part of your brain treats your future self like a stranger, how can you convince yourself to care more about a future you? Or the future of the planet? How do we build courage and overcome the fears of an uncertainty tomorrow? How do we acquire a future mindset in order to shape our future story on our terms?

One way is to be aware of the story we are feeding ourselves right now.
FEAR WOLF AND COURAGE WOLF

A Cherokee elder proclaims to his grandson, "A terrible fight is going on inside of me. It's a fight between two wolves: the fear wolf and the courage wolf. The fear wolf is full of negativity, mistrust, lies, and hopelessness. The other wolf is full of positivity, trust, love, and hope." The grandfather looks at his grandson. "This same fight is going on inside of you."

Upon reflection the boy asks, "Grandfather, which wolf will win?" The elder Cherokee replies, "The one you feed."

In contemplating this folktale, we can see the connection to the story we tell ourselves individually and collectively. And the story we tell ourselves has more power to create a brave, bold, positive world than we may think.

Sure, we can get beaten down by the dark narratives, the trauma of the pandemic, climate Armageddon, worries about global and economic turmoil, dread of relentless disruption and the dark thunderstorms of unceasing change and turmoil. Yes, we can become overwhelmed, paralyzed, and let the fears of the future fill in the blank frames of uncertainty with a narrative of negativity that becomes our frequent mindset.

Or we can starve the fear wolf and feed our courage wolf -- which is very hungry. There are always multiple possible future scenarios. We need to ask ourselves what is our preferred future? What is the story we want to feed ourselves?
THE FUTURE IS A MINDSET
"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -- Wayne Dyer

Kevin Kelly also tells us: "It is extremely difficult to create a desirable future without first envisioning it. To imagine is really the first step in creating anything. Therefore, an essential chore for making a future we want to live in, is to imagine what it is like and how we get there".

So how did New York City get there? By inspiring people, sparking their imaginations, and reminding them what was positive and exciting: Broadway, Central Park, the Iconic skyline, the city that never sleeps...

Soon, Woody Allen would write a movie love poem to the city entitled "Manhattan". Martin Scorsese would direct and produce "New York, New York". And Frank Sinatra would start spreading the news singing, "I want to be a part of it - New York, New York", a song that revived his career as well as the city's renaissance.

British philosopher James Allen wrote: Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the promise of what you shall one day be. Your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil." So how do we dream lofty dreams that become the ideal prophecy of a desirable Good Future?

In this case, the first step is a worldwide campaign; an international movement of countries, companies, world leaders, influencers, celebrities, and people of all generations coming together to share how we perceive tomorrow.

To start the ball rolling, we have created " The Good Future Project ", a consortium and coalition of futurists and thought leaders with the ambitious mission to re-brand the future. Like the song says, "Start spreading the news."

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" Re-branding the future: A special guest post by Chris Nolan; The Good Future Project [Gerd Leonhard Futurist Humanist Author Keynote Speaker]

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Also available on Medium and the TGFP blog. In 1975, New York was a crime-ridden nearly bankrupt metropolis with garbage piling up on sidewalks. It certainly wasn't a tourist destination but more akin to the dark dystopian Gotham City that inspired the Batman movies.

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Too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing - COGNITIVE WORLD

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Too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing-Technology's Future

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The Good Future Project - The Good Future is entirely possible - we just need to make the right decisions today!

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Mistrusting the Future makes it very hard to give up the past & the present – By Gerd Leonhard - The Good Future Project

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In this short video I address a key challenge that often surfaces in my work with clients: the fear of the future, and a general hunch that we “can’t trust the future” i.e. that nothing good will come of it, and that there is very little we can do about it. And of course, humans

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The next 10 years: Perma-Change and #thegoodfuture Futurist Gerd Leonhard at Baringa Leaders Event

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Gerd is a Futurist and a Humanist, a leading global Keynote Speaker (live-on-stage as well as virtually / remotely), the Author of 5 books including ’Technology…

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Imagine if you could wave a wand and the world would magically get 1% better. Nobody would notice. But if the world got 1% better every year, the compounding effect would be very noticeable over time.

Kevin Kelly, founding editor at WIRED magazine, calls this incremental progress toward a better world "protopia." Protopia is a direction, not a destiny.

Dystopian predictions for humanity are darkly seductive, but they're ultimately wrong. And utopian predictions? They're even worse, says Kelly. Crawling toward betterment (protopia) is how we build the future, 1% at a time.

KEVIN KELLY: I'm definitely not the foremost technology historian. I don't even call myself a futurist. I like to say, I like to predict the future. I have pinned to my Twitter profile, "Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists." This is not a world we have fewer problems. This is a world we have as many, if not more problems, but those problems themselves are opportunities. It is much, much harder to create a future that we would like to live in- unless we can imagine it first.

I'm Kevin Kelly, I'm Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, and author of a bunch of books, including "What Technology Wants."

Imagine if I had a magic wand, and I could make the world 1% better. You wouldn't be able to tell. Nothing would really change very much. But if I took that 1% and compounded it year by year, over time we would notice that. That very mild 1% progress is 'Protopia.' We are very slowly crawling towards betterment. Protopia is a direction. It's not a destiny. I bought into the hippie perspective. I wanted that small is beautiful, the Henry David Thoreau, simplified "Walden" life. It was the big systems that I didn't trust. The big technology, the big corporations- but I did go to Asia, and there, things began to change. I began to live in very remote parts of Asia that had no technology. It was like being on a time machine. I was transported back centuries- a city like Kathmandu that had no vehicles whatsoever- to Northern Afghanistan. These towns there without electricity. And then there were these cities, Hong Kong, Tokyo, right before my eyes, were emerging out of the ground. So I would go by a rice paddy, and then I would come back a couple years later, and there would be like factories and people who had money. Right before my eyes, I saw what technology was bringing people. So that was the first glimmers of changing my mind about what this stuff was really about.

Part of Protopia is to envision a desirable future. The problem so far is that a lot of those visions of the future are dystopias. People have trouble imagining a world filled of technology, where it's a world that they want to live because the robots are gonna take over and kill us all: the rogue AI, or AI taking over, AI trampling us. The problem with dystopia is that it's just not sustainable. In history, dystopias just don't last long. The first thing that happens is the war lords, in their greed, install some form of order. It's not an order that we prefer, but it's a form of order. Utopia has a similar problem, in that it's actually not a desirable place. First of all, it's impossible: there can't really be a world that has no problems. I think if you made an eternal world that was forever getting worse, and an eternal world that never changed, the way you punish someone eternally is you put 'em in the world that doesn't ever change. There is a role, if not a duty, for Protopia, in helping us to imagine what that preferable future would be like.

After almost a decade traveling, I came back. I decided to ride my bicycle across to see the U.S., which I'd never seen. I was attracted to the Amish. In my initial interactions with them, they weren't anti-technology. They actually liked to hack technology to work around their own rules. I became interested in how did they actually decide which technologies to accept and which didn't. Americans, and my friends, and myself, we are also choosing technologies. Should I have Twitter or not? Should I have a phone or not? Do I wanna have an electric car or not? But we aren't choosing very deliberately, and we are certainly not doing it collectively. That's what I discovered the Amish are doing- is they actually have criteria to help them make those choices. And their criteria is: 'Will this technology keep our communities together and spend as much time with our communities versus going out?' And that's one of the reasons why they're actually embracing cell phones. They've been very slow, but they are embracing cell phones, because their communities are not contiguous, they're actually kind of broken up. And they found, big surprise, that the phone actually brings their communities together. Everything is optimized. And technologies, they feel, take them away from that, they're going to reject. And technologies that would enable them to do that, they're going to embrace.

The more important point for Protopia is that they have those criteria that they use to govern what technologies that they want to use. Most of the problems in the future are gonna be caused by the technologies today- that's the Protopian view. But, the solution to the problems made by those new technologies is not less technology. It's not to dial back the technology. It's not to stop AI. It's to make better AI. I want to emphasize, of course, that this is not a prediction, because every prediction is wrong. These are scenarios. These are wishes. This is aspirational. But just like "Star Trek" has been an inspiration to so many people making things, because they said, "I wanna make that communicator." And that's basically what we got with smartphones. They can be instrumental and powerful, to actually have a picture of something that we're aiming for in order to actualize it.

NASA OPERATOR: 'We have ignition.'

KELLY: I don't think there is a dark side. Part of Protopia is it incorporates pessimism. It actually says the problems are valuable. When you drive a car down the road, you need an engine to move it forward and you need brakes to steer. The vehicle technology requires both the engine of optimism and the breaks of pessimism in order to steer. The entire world should endorse Protopia. I don't believe in an endpoint- that we're moving in some way to some final endpoint, some perfection. We are moving, rather, in directions. And Protopia is a direction, which is moving towards increasing options. More choices in the world.

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Stop chasing utopia. Create "protopia" instead.

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Imagine if you could wave a wand and the world would magically get 1% better. Nobody would notice. But if the world got 1% better every year, the compounding effect would be very noticeable over time. Kevin Kelly, founding editor at WIRED magazine, calls this incremental progress toward a better world "protopia."

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Search Twitter for Protopia and Kevin Kelly

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Search Twitter for Protopia and Kevin Kelly

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The next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 10 years: #protopia #ai #gamechangers

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New compilation on ChatGPT and the Future of AI: Consider this. By Futurist Speaker Gerd Leonhard

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Will civilization collapse? | WIRED’s  Kevin Kelly

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[Translations: Japanese]

Every utopia is a fiction, with necessary flaws that prevent it from ever becoming real. I don't believe in utopias. Particularly technological ones. (That doesn't stop critics from accusing me of being a technological utopian.) My aversion to utopias goes even deeper. I have not met a utopia I would even want to live in.

[Circular buildings = utopia, image from 3D Utopia]

I don't have to worry about that nightmare because utopias are impossible. Yet dystopias, their dark opposites, are possible, though unlikely. Dystopias are certainly fascinating, and a lot more entertaining than most utopias. There are also much easier to envision. Who can't imagine an apocalyptic last-man-on-earth world, or a world run by robot overseers, or a disintegrating megacity, or simple armageddon? There are endless possibilities of how the modern civilization collapses. (See my previous post on Collapsitarians). But just because dystopias are cinematic and dramatic, and much easier to imagine, that does not make them much more likely.

The flaw in most dystopian narratives is that they are not sustainable. They flash chaos, but then quickly self-organize. The outlaws and underworlds that seem so exciting at "first demise" are quickly taken over by organized crime and militants, so the lawlessness becomes racketeering, and over very little time, racketeering becomes a type of corrupted government - all to maximize the income of the bandits. In a sense rapid greed rapidly cures dystopias. Real dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union, or Libya, rather than Mad Max or Bladerunner: they are stifling bureaucratic rather than lawless. Ruled by fear, their society is hobbled except for the benefit of a few, but like the pirates at sea (see The Invisible Hook) there is far more law and order than not. In fact in real broken societies, the outrageous outlawry we associate with dystopias are not permitted. The big bandits keep the small bandits to a minimum.

I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.

Today we've become so aware of the downsides of innovations, and so disappointed with the promises of past utopias, that we now find it hard to believe even in protopia - that tomorrow will be better than today. We find it very difficult to imagine any kind of future we would want to live in. Name a single science fiction future that is both plausible and desirable?

No one wants to move to the future today. We are avoiding it. We don't have much desire for life one hundred years from now. Many dread it. That makes it hard to take the future seriously. So we don't take a generational perspective. We're stuck in the short now. We also adopt the Singularity perspective: that imagining the future in 100 years is technically impossible. So there is no protopia we are reaching for.

It may be that this future-blindness is simply the inescapable affliction of our modern world. Perhaps at this stage in civilization and technological advance, we enter into permanent and ceaseless future-blindness. Utopia, dystopia, and protopia all disappear. There is only the Blind Now.

That is possible. But I am hoping that our current future-blindness is only a passing phase and that we will again begin to generate plausible visions of a desirable future, ones that are slightly better than today. These protopian visions won't be as thrilling as either dystopias or utopias, but they might be thrilling enough to aim towards.

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Translations: Japanese] Every utopia is a fiction, with necessary flaws that prevent it from ever becoming real. I don't believe in utopias. Particularly technological ones. (That doesn't stop critics from accusing me of being a technological utopian.) My aversion to ... Continue reading →

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I don’t believe in utopia. I believe in protopia — that through progress and process tomorrow will be slightly better than today.

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I don’t believe in utopia. I believe in protopia — that through progress and process tomorrow will be slightly better than today.

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I don’t believe in utopia. I believe in protopia — that through progress and process tomorrow will be slightly better than today.
— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) April 18, 2014

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I don’t believe in utopia. I believe in protopia — that through progress and process tomorrow will be slightly better than today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
I don’t believe in utopia. I believe in protopia — that through progress and process tomorrow will be slightly better than today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
I don’t believe in utopia. I believe in protopia — that through progress and process tomorrow will be slightly better than today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Imagine that tomorrow, the world magically got 1% better. Nobody would notice. But if the world got 1% better every year, the "compounding" effect would be very noticeable - in the same way that compounding grows a bank account.

When technology solves a problem, it creates new problems. The solution is not less technology but better technology.

Kevin Kelly of WIRED magazine calls this incremental progress toward a better world "protopia." Protopia is a direction, not a destiny.

This video is part of The Progress Issue, a Big Think and Freethink special collaboration.

In this inaugural special issue we set out to explore progress - how it happens, how we nurture it and how we stifle it, and what changes are required in how we approach our most serious problems to ensure greater and more equitable progress for all.

It's time for a return to optimism. Enjoy the full issue now.

Read more of our stories from The Progress Issue:

KEVIN KELLY: I'm definitely not the foremost technology historian. I don't even call myself a futurist. I like to say, I like to predict the future. I have pinned to my Twitter profile, "Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists." This is not a world we have fewer problems. This is a world we have as many, if not more problems, but those problems themselves are opportunities. It is much, much harder to create a future that we would like to live in- unless we can imagine it first.

I'm Kevin Kelly, I'm Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, and author of a bunch of books, including "What Technology Wants."

Imagine if I had a magic wand, and I could make the world 1% better. You wouldn't be able to tell. Nothing would really change very much. But if I took that 1% and compounded it year by year, over time we would notice that. That very mild 1% progress is 'Protopia.' We are very slowly crawling towards betterment. Protopia is a direction. It's not a destiny. I bought into the hippie perspective. I wanted that small is beautiful, the Henry David Thoreau, simplified "Walden" life. It was the big systems that I didn't trust. The big technology, the big corporations- but I did go to Asia, and there, things began to change. I began to live in very remote parts of Asia that had no technology. It was like being on a time machine. I was transported back centuries- a city like Kathmandu that had no vehicles whatsoever- to Northern Afghanistan. These towns there without electricity. And then there were these cities, Hong Kong, Tokyo, right before my eyes, were emerging out of the ground. So I would go by a rice paddy, and then I would come back a couple years later, and there would be like factories and people who had money. Right before my eyes, I saw what technology was bringing people. So that was the first glimmers of changing my mind about what this stuff was really about.

Part of Protopia is to envision a desirable future. The problem so far is that a lot of those visions of the future are dystopias. People have trouble imagining a world filled of technology, where it's a world that they want to live because the robots are gonna take over and kill us all: the rogue AI, or AI taking over, AI trampling us. The problem with dystopia is that it's just not sustainable. In history, dystopias just don't last long. The first thing that happens is the war lords, in their greed, install some form of order. It's not an order that we prefer, but it's a form of order. Utopia has a similar problem, in that it's actually not a desirable place. First of all, it's impossible: there can't really be a world that has no problems. I think if you made an eternal world that was forever getting worse, and an eternal world that never changed, the way you punish someone eternally is you put 'em in the world that doesn't ever change. There is a role, if not a duty, for Protopia, in helping us to imagine what that preferable future would be like.

After almost a decade traveling, I came back. I decided to ride my bicycle across to see the U.S., which I'd never seen. I was attracted to the Amish. In my initial interactions with them, they weren't anti-technology. They actually liked to hack technology to work around their own rules. I became interested in how did they actually decide which technologies to accept and which didn't. Americans, and my friends, and myself, we are also choosing technologies. Should I have Twitter or not? Should I have a phone or not? Do I wanna have an electric car or not? But we aren't choosing very deliberately, and we are certainly not doing it collectively. That's what I discovered the Amish are doing- is they actually have criteria to help them make those choices. And their criteria is: 'Will this technology keep our communities together and spend as much time with our communities versus going out?' And that's one of the reasons why they're actually embracing cell phones. They've been very slow, but they are embracing cell phones, because their communities are not contiguous, they're actually kind of broken up. And they found, big surprise, that the phone actually brings their communities together. Everything is optimized. And technologies, they feel, take them away from that, they're going to reject. And technologies that would enable them to do that, they're going to embrace.

The more important point for Protopia is that they have those criteria that they use to govern what technologies that they want to use. Most of the problems in the future are gonna be caused by the technologies today- that's the Protopian view. But, the solution to the problems made by those new technologies is not less technology. It's not to dial back the technology. It's not to stop AI. It's to make better AI. I want to emphasize, of course, that this is not a prediction, because every prediction is wrong. These are scenarios. These are wishes. This is aspirational. But just like "Star Trek" has been an inspiration to so many people making things, because they said, "I wanna make that communicator." And that's basically what we got with smartphones. They can be instrumental and powerful, to actually have a picture of something that we're aiming for in order to actualize it.

[NASA OPERATOR] 'We have ignition.'

KELLY: I don't think there is a dark side. Part of Protopia is it incorporates pessimism. It actually says the problems are valuable. When you drive a car down the road, you need an engine to move it forward and you need brakes to steer. The vehicle technology requires both the engine of optimism and the breaks of pessimism in order to steer. The entire world should endorse Protopia. I don't believe in an endpoint- that we're moving in some way to some final endpoint, some perfection. We are moving, rather, in directions. And Protopia is a direction, which is moving towards increasing options. More choices in the world.

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Imagine that tomorrow, the world magically got 1% better. Nobody would notice. But if the world got 1% better every year, the "compounding" effect would be very noticeable - in the same way that compounding grows a bank account. When technology solves a problem, it creates new problems. The solution is not less technology but better technology.

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The Future Will Be Shaped by Optimists | Kevin Kelly | TED