‘The Fizz’ and transformative futures

This piece is republished here from an article I wrote recently for Chatham House’s Sustainability Accelerator on The Fizz, an AI-based futures project I’m working on with David Bent and the team at the Accelerator. It starts with an introduction written by the Accelerator team. As part of the Sustainability Accelerator’s ongoing research into The Rift, we are working with several groups to understand what kinds of practices can most effectively help us to navigate emerging conditions of climatic and societal disruption. As a practice, futures seeks to understand the forces that shape the future, so that we create better choices in the present. And as we navigate the first years of our new reality–our overlapping crises of climate, biodiversity, economics, energy and geopolitics– we’ve been exploring what role innovative approaches to futures might have to play. This has led us to think about how AI can be used well, to augment human abilities and spark the making of new meaning. One…