• Mágoulo’s School

  THEME 1: What The Future Holds

  Posted by profmag on January 9, 2023 at 4:58 am

  Objective: Understand the 3 different visions of the future and create a “life kit” approach to personal and group preparation.

  TITLE: What The Future Holds

  1. Introduction: Hook, In this video, What you get
     1. Hook: Do you ever think about the future? What will life be like next year? In ten years? In a thousand years? We think of the future like a Nether Portal. Before you enter, you better be ready for what’s on the other side. But you can’t see what’s on the other side. So you better be ready for anything.
     2. In this video: we’re going to talk a lot about the future and our ideas about how a smart gamer hacks it even though they don’t know what’s going to happen. We’ll also give an update and a preview of the launch of our upcoming civilization game in Minecraft.
     3. What you get: [Maybe an activity to create a skin for the game?]
  2. Big Idea: 3 Visions of the Future
     1. So we’re saying the future is like a Nether Portal. When you’re playing survival MC, what do you do before you enter a portal?
     2. There are basically three types of visions of the future people have for the future: Utopian, Incremental (or 50/50), and Dystopian (or Apocalyptic) [explain]. You can basically say these are manifestations of the three responses to reality: the optimist, and realist, and the pessimist. The interesting thing is this: we get more innovations and creativity from the extreme ends: from the optimist and the pessimist, and reality does swing sometimes to the extreme making the optimist and pessimist right every once in while. However, the realist, since the view is the average, is right most of the time, but is also the most boring. You don’t have to be one of these all the time, but which one do you think you are and why?
     3. Let’s jump into some examples of the three future visions: Utopian, Incremental, and Dystopian. You each did some research on this and picked three favorite pop-culture or historical examples. Share those examples with us. TODO: Research The Three Types of Future Visions. When you did this, I had you make a list of all your favorite media. When you look at that list, does it lean a certain way? I mean is it U/I/D?
     4. It’s interesting that these three future visions show up in real people who are leaders and influencers in real emerging trends. For example, if you have a CEO who works in AI technology or biotech, they have one of these three views and it strongly motivates their ethics (what they think is right/wrong) and the decisions (we’re going to go this way as a society or company). So I asked you to do some research into some examples of this. What did you find? TODO: The Three Types of Future Visions in Emerging Trends
     5. So there are these three visions of the future and there are people who effect our lives — our parents, teachers, politicians, business leaders — who live according to these views. So, at least in some ways, what people believe in this area will strongly effect the future that we will create. Humans create their own future, at least in part. So that makes your vision of the future pretty important. And you are a real participant in that no matter how young you are and how much power you have today. You may think you are at a place where you have to wait until you can do something about it. But, on a micro level, what you do today, which is influenced by your vision of the future, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of the real future that will be. For example, if you feel like the future will be dystopian, and that stresses you out to the point that you’re like “whatever, I think I’ll play more video games,” then you won’t do the extra work to become the kind of leader that could prevent the dystopian reality, so you’re actually creating it. What do you think about that idea?: The Self-fulfilling Prophecy.
  3. The Hack: How To Hack an Unknown Future.
     1. The Hack is the section of our video where we try to boil down our big concept to some kind of actionable skill or principle. It’s like: what good is an idea if you can’t use it to do anything? So we like to try to get it to something useable, and for us, that means figuring out how to turn the big concept into a hack.
     2. In the beginning of the show, we were talking about how the future is like going through a Nether Portal because you’re blind to what’s on the other side and what our different strategies are for preparing for that. That’s a great analogy for a hacker strategy for dealing with the future. In fact, while we were researching this episode, @Etcetera had a great quote:

        If you don’t know how to win, the best way to play is to make sure you don’t lose.

        At first, that sounds a little “No duh!” But when we look at this a little closer, your strategy is totally different between “playing to win” and “playing not to lose.” When you play to win, you’re really going for it and taking the risk that comes along with that. When you’re playing not to lose, you are hanging back and evaluating and actually trying to avoid some of the risk. When you’ve played a game a dozen times, you can play to win because you know what the risks are and how to avoid them. But when you’re playing a game for the first time, you’re blind to the risks and so “playing not to lose” is a better choice. The future can be both — a game you’ve played before and one you are playing for the first time, but more often than not its the second, especially in times of great transition like our current times and the farther out the future is from today.

     3. So this applies a little bit of game theory to what we’re talking about. If you think about the future as a game you’re playing for the first time, you want to win, but at this point you don’t know how to win. In a game, you’ve already played, and it is clear how to win, you can specialize and strip away anything unnecessary. It’s like when you know a map or level well and you are speed-running your game, and you know to fight some enemies and bypass others completely to make better time. That’s only possible because you “know the future” from your experience.
  4. Install the Hack: Make your “life kit”.
     1. What are the different components of a good “life kit”? “Know What”, “Know How”, “Know Who”.
     2. When it comes to the “Know What”, this points to an “all-around education” or the idea that, at least on a basic level, your knowledge should be comprehensive. Comprehensive means you have enough things in your knowledge inventory to be able to do anything life may ask you to do, or at least you know enough to know what you don’t know and how to learn and grow to get that knowledge. The public education system, with its core idea of standardized education, is designed around this reality. They use various schemas to organize all the things a “standard student” or, maybe more accurately “standard citizen” or “standard worker” should know. PROJECT: Critique the Standard Schema and Design Your Own.

  

  • This discussion was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  profmag.
  • This discussion was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  Etcetera.
  • This discussion was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  profmag.
  • This discussion was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  profmag.
  • This discussion was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  profmag.

  profmag replied 1 year, 8 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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