A Brief History of the Future

Man: I start football at 4 years old.

I start really, really young.

I always wanted to be forward.

-I was like-- -Always?

Yeah.

I wanted to score goals.

When you are kids, you-- you dream to score goals.

You know how to juggle?

-Yeah, sure.

-Ha ha ha!

Right foot or left foot?

-Right foot.

-Right foot, like me.

You take the ball to go like this.

You know, and you go right, left, right, left.

-So easy.

-Not easy, but if you try-- yeah, for sure, why not?

Ha ha ha!

Wallach: Is this the first thing you learned when you started playing?

Is this what you started doing?

No, the first thing I learned is to score goals.

That not help you to score goals.

-Ha ha!

-No.

Wallach, voice-over: I'm in Paris today with the world-renowned athlete Kylian Mbapp to get his perspective on what it takes to visualize the outcomes we want to see unfold because in this moment, we're becoming urgently aware that we have real choices to make, the outcome of which will shape so much of what comes next.

We get to decide, and while we focus a lot on what we don't want, we often fail to take the most important step of all-- picturing what kind of futures we do want, seeing the goal we are aiming for.

[Crowd cheering] [Singers vocalizing] [Cheering and applause] [Announcer speaking French] Wallach: What's the importance of visualizing success in making anything happen?

You know, it's a part of yourself.

Me, I was born with that.

I always have this idea of success, to be someone, and to achieve many things, and every year, every month, every day, I have new goals, and-- not only in sport, in everything you do.

In life, you have objective.

You have goals for your family, for yourself, at work.

And I think that's the step to success.

Walk me through the moment right before you take a penalty kick.

You're taking a shot on goal.

What are you--what are you seeing in your mind?

[Crowd cheering] If I score, what'll happen?

If I miss, what'll happen?

[Crowd cheering] And that's, like, 100 questions in a second that's come in your mind.

And you have to be able to say, like, "Now is the present," you know?

You let the future come in your mind, but the most important thing in the penalty is to be in the moment.

And you go with the confidence that you're going to score.

There is no other option.

[Crowd cheering] I assume you don't visualize you missing the goal.

No, never.

Never.

That can happen, but never.

If you visualize that, you miss a goal before the shot-- heh heh--you lose 50% of your confidence, and you need 100% of confidence to score a goal.

Wallach, voice-over: I'm often asked, as a futurist, "Well, what if?"

And most of those what ifs are usually worst-case scenarios.

What if an asteroid comes hurtling towards our planet?

What if AI gets out of control?

I think at this point we can ask ourselves a potentially more important what if question.

What if we're successful?

What if we are able to provide basic and beyond-basic services for everyone on the planet?

Because we tend to think of the what if through a kind of a negative lens.

If we want to be able to move forward and build out those flourishing futures for the generations to come, we have to be asking ourselves, "What if we actually got it right?"

[Grimes' "Oblivion" playing] [Vocalizing] I never walk about after dark It's my point of view 'Cause someone could break your neck Coming up behind you Always coming and you'd never have a clue I never look behind all the time I will wait forever Always looking straight Thinking, counting all the hours you wait The Greek term telos means ultimate aim, ultimate goal.

What is it that we are doing, and why are we doing it?

For over 100,000 years, the telos for Homo sapiens was basically to survive, to make sure there would be another generation.

Now, for the first time in the human story, we have the opportunity to step back and say, "Well, what's next?

"Where do we want to take this?

To what end for the Homo sapien project?"

Is it just to build cool technology, or is it to build a world beyond our imagination?

But how do we change the way we think?

What does it take to set aside old assumptions and ask bigger, better questions about the future we want to see unfold?

I came to Dubai to meet Raya Bidshahri, who believes that the kind of imagination we need right now has a lot to do with transforming how we teach young minds.

Here at the School of Humanity, she is challenging decades of traditionally held ideas about education in order to change the way her students learn how to think and rethink everything.

Bidshahri: Hi, everyone.

Welcome to our designing with nature session.

Why are we learning this?

Why is this important?

It's a field of study where we look at lessons from nature in order to inspire human innovations.

And it's a really powerful tool to help us solve some of the problems that we're facing today.

Bidshahri, voice-over: We all, for whatever reason, have a story we tell ourselves about what it means to go to school, what it means to learn, what that experience should feel like.

And there's this mainstream kind of narrative in our collective imaginations.

Changing that for an entire species is tough.

Narrator: Acres of rich soil, and willing hands gave the good earth tireless care.

But times have changed.

Machines of every type are multiplying productivity in remarkable ways.

This is an investment for your children's future here.

Bidshahri: A lot of the structures that we're experiencing in schools today came from the assembly line.

We really needed to train millions of factory workers.

In fact, the reason we have bells... [Bell rings] in between lessons is because in the factory, you would have bells to signal the movement from one assembly line to another.

You have this global standardization that is very much an echo of the industrial era, and you don't seen enough mainstream alternatives to that journey.

We're actually moving towards a creative economy, especially with the rise of AI and automation.

The kinds of tasks and thinking and processes that will be most difficult to replace with machines are the ones that are most creative and imaginative and require higher-ordered thinking.

So this kind of Henry Ford model of education makes sense in the early 1900s, when millions of people are moving off of farms, and we have to get them ready to kind of work in factories.

Now, here we are really at the beginning of the 21st century.

What does it look like if we want to do it differently?

Yeah.

So what I love to do when people ask me that is take a step back and apply first principles thinking.

So imagine our education system didn't exist and we weren't tinkering with it, we weren't building on top of it.

-We just kind of set it aside... -Yep.

and we got to design something from scratch for today's world.

What would we teach young minds?

How would we teach it?

And why would we teach those things?

For my team and I, we think that the purpose of education should be to help humanity flourish.

And that can mean different things to different people, but it's all about contributing to human progress.

Wallach, voice-over: It's striking to see the effect these ideas are having on the students here and around the world, through her vision to see a future where everyone has access to high-quality learning opportunities, both online and in person, regardless of where they are in the world.

While I was there, I got to sit down and hear from a few of these students themselves.

What tomorrows do you actually want to see?

For me, I would like to see some progress.

And--but with progress comes consequences.

I don't think we'd ever achieve a complete utopia, and I don't think a complete dystopia exists either.

To me, I'd like to see a balanced world with progress in, like, to me, important fields would be medicine, business.

The environment is a big one.

With AI, people now using ChatGPT, there's so much better things that are going to come in the future that we can't even imagine right now.

Thinking about that there's going to be a lot of new things, that really gets my hopes up.

Boy: The future is progressing fast.

It's not only about the governments doing everything, right?

It is also our responsibility as individuals, uh, living in our countries, living on Earth, to have a personal understanding of these topics since, as a community, we will be affected by the future.

One way, again linking back, to improve this is to improve the education system because we need more, you know, critical thinkers and people that are a lot more curious than the current education system allows us to be.

Wallach: You guys are a generation that is inheriting a lot.

-Yeah.

-How does that feel?

I mean, yeah.

We have had a lot just dumped on our shoulders, but there are lots of lessons to be learned.

We learn from our past generations.

And also, I think it just shapes us as a generation to think like problem solvers.

We are creating the future.

I feel like that's the only thing that we can be certain about, so we can be a little bit more positive about that.

Bidshahri: Education is the most powerful tool that we have for human progress and for uplifting humanity.

I can only imagine if every child on Earth received access to a quality education that allowed them to upskill for the emerging workforce, to tackle their local challenges, to flourish in life, what that would mean to improve the society around them.

That's really what the objective of education should be.

It's not about tests or jobs or exam prep.

It's for us as a species to take a step back and say, "Where do we want to go?"

[Baby laughing] Man: It's a chance to be motivated by hope more than fear, to be motivated by curiosity more than concern.

And it isn't to say, forget the fear.

It isn't to say, forget the concern.

But to realize the future of what we can create is so amazing.

[Children shouting] Man: The future itself is something that has its own history, if you think about it.

There's a history of the idea of the future.

For most of human history, the idea of the future is one that was essentially determined-- that according to the book, according to the cosmology, we have a story about how the world began, we have a story about how the world will end.

But one of the effects of secularization, let's say, in all of its forms over the past centuries, is that the future was no longer determined.

The future was open.

It was contingent.

And I think this contingency of the future is something that we need to embrace.

Woman: Giving people a creative space to think beyond what their world is now is really important, because the world now is broken.

So we don't want to just confine ourselves to the box of the world of now.

It just doesn't work.

Giving people that space to say, "What if?"

That's what we want to do.

Wallach, voice-over: Built within us is the ability to imagine and reimagine the world as we want to see it.

Thomas More's famous book "Utopia" was really about this kind of far-off land where everything seemed perfect.

Utopias are fascinating.

They fill us with wonder and awe at what could be.

I'd like to buy The world a home And furnish it with love Grow apple trees Narrator: To all who come to this happy place, welcome.

[Indistinct singing] Our Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow.

We call it EPCOT.

Narrator: Demonstrating to the world what American communities can accomplish through proper control of planning and design.

Wallach, voice-over: But here's the thing.

It eventually falls in on itself, because nothing is perfect.

Now, we know we don't want dystopias, and we know utopias fall apart.

So what's left?

An idea called protopia.

And protopian thinking, and being a protopian, means that you believe our best days are ahead of us, that we could actually build a tomorrow that will be better, but it won't be perfect, and the job will then be picked up by the next generation.

These are the projects I'm interested in-- people who are building better futures.

Wallach, voice-over: It's an amazing thing to see firsthand how better futures don't just happen.

They're built by everyday people who decide to lean in, rather than look away from the challenges before us.

And perhaps no set of challenges today is more pressing than the ones we see across the natural world, where human activity has damaged and destroyed the systems of life that sustain us all.

Here in Freeport, a scuba diver turned coral farmer is working to rethink how we preserve these systems of life underwater.

Man: We are at Coral Vita's farm in Freeport, Grand Bahama.

It's the world's first commercial land-based coral farm for reef restoration.

So just like we can plant trees for reforestation, we grow and plant corals for reef restoration.

This is a self-contained system where, whether by modifying the temperature, the light, the flow, we can determine this is what makes corals grow the fastest, is the healthiest.

We can cycle corals through the system to figure out how we can do our job even better.

What exactly is coral?

A lot of people think it's a colorful rock.

In fact, it's an animal that has plants living inside of it.

It's an ancient distant cousin of a jellyfish.

Within its sort of tissue skin layer, it has this symbiotic algae that lives inside of it.

It's what gives corals their color, and also through photosynthesis is what feeds the corals for the most part.

And then as the corals grow, they make limestone rock for their skeleton.

They really create the habitat, the nurseries for fish, for shrimp, for all sorts of sea life and wildlife.

They're like the skyscrapers of this underwater world.

Since the 1970s, we've lost half of the world's coral reefs, and we're currently on track to lose over 90% by 2050.

They support the livelihoods of up to 1 billion people in over 100 countries around the world, along with sustaining a quarter of all marine life.

They act like natural sea walls.

They reduce wave energy on average by 97%.

So they protect property.

They save lives.

They power tourism economies.

There are entire fishing communities that are completely reliant on these reefs.

So as they die, it's an ecological tragedy that impacts all people everywhere.

We started Coral Vita in order to create a new model to scale restoration globally and so that there will be future reefs for generations to come.

So yeah, this is basically where we grow the corals.

So we set up these tanks.

We're pumping clean seawater through.

And we work our magic for 6, 12 months on average, before we then outplant the corals.

Wallach: So all the coral that I'm looking at in here at one point actually came from the ocean?

Yeah.

So this is actually a good example.

We call this coral broodstock.

And so this was a piece of elkhorn coral... Yeah.

that we've sort of put onto these plates.

This might have broken off because of a storm or someone dropped their anchor.

It was tumbling around the reef.

We collected it, fragment it into these tiny little pieces that then triggers the accelerated growth rates until it's time to actually screw this in.

And then the coral will grow over and do its thing.

And so this is something that naturally happens, obviously, but it takes a much longer time.

Exactly.

So normally in nature, uh, it could take years, if not decades.

And this will be ready to outplant in closer to 6 to 12 months.

Wallach, voice-over: Sam invited me out with his team to plant some of the newly ready coral, and see firsthand both the damage and potential he sees here on this local reef.

Wallach: Where are we right now?

Sam: We are sitting right on top of Rainbow Reef on the south shore of Grand Bahama Island.

50, 60 miles off the coast of Florida, we're on top of this incredible barrier reef, and where we're doing a lot of our restoration efforts from our coral farm here.

We're focused right now on a few hectares' area worth of reef where we've been planting thousands and thousands of coral.

All right.

Well, let's get to it.

[Gurgling] Wallach, voice-over: Over the years, so much of human technology has treated the effects to nature as an afterthought.

Now, it's remarkable to see innovation designed to ensure healthier futures for these life support systems that impact us all, a reminder that the tools we hold in our hands right now, if used wisely, can protect and preserve life in new and needed ways.

Sam: Our ultimate vision is that every nation on Earth that has coral reefs has large-scale, land-based coral farms.

And it doesn't have to obviously be us.

There's countless other people that are doing this.

Because we have an opportunity to do so, and we also have an imperative to do so.

Wallach: I was in a conversation with someone not that long ago, and they were talking about how, you know, the future is smart cities and smart appliances.

You know, smart frigerator that tells you when you're running low on milk.

And while smart is good, what we need right now is wisdom.

And there's a difference.

What we need to be able to do is kind of step back and discern, where do we want to go?

Where do we want to take this?

Where do we want to take this species?

Where do we want to take this whole thing that we call Homo sapiens on Earth?

And that isn't just about smart.

To answer that question, we need wisdom.

Bratton: The fork in the road where we are right now can lead in a lot of different directions.

Howe: There's reasons to be optimistic.

We've got to believe that there's a better way and something better is to come.

Not because at all it's guaranteed, but because the alternative is completely unthinkable.

Bratton: We do have the tools.

We can, in fact, imagine and compose radically different kinds of futures.

There's nothing stopping us at the technological level.

Hoffman: All of these technologies are just beginning, and super important for the elevation of humanity.

The technology may be an aid, but the technology is not going to save us.

Who's going to save us is us.

It's we who need to solve it.

Wallach: What does it look like to innovate, using technology to solve for some of the biggest challenges we face?

It's my first time in Iceland, a place that's so beautiful, it's overwhelming.

I'm here to visit a country that runs completely on renewable energy at a moment when many countries are struggling to achieve a fraction of that.

Iceland is unique in that it straddles the Mid-Atlantic ridge sitting on top of a volcanic hotspot.

So when they began to rethink how to power the country, they decided to make use of the unique resources they have right here at home.

One of the technologies they're using here is geothermal power.

And I wanted to understand more about how it works and the ideas it could offer all of us in search of futures with cleaner, more renewable energy.

Woman: We are in a geothermal powerplant, and the name of it is Hellisheidi.

And this is by far the largest geothermal powerplant in Iceland, and one of the largest in the whole world.

What exactly is geothermal?

So geothermal is just the heat generated by the Earth's core.

And we want to extract this heat and use it for electricity and just heating purposes.

Wallach, voice-over: While I was there, Angelica showed me around and explained more about the process, as well as some of the challenges they're still working to solve.

Kapatza: We drill down approximately 2.5 kilometers depths.

We take mostly water and steam, and after that, we just use it for the electricity production or the heating process for our homes.

Wallach: How does the steam become electricity?

So after we have separated these two different phases, steam enters a turbine and rotates pretty fast the blades.

-Mm-hmm.

-And when I say fast, I mean 3,000 rotations per minute.

Wow, yeah.

After that, this kinetic, like, mechanical energy is converted to electrical in the generator.

And after that, you see all the power lines over here?

That's where it's getting sent into the national grid of the whole country.

Wallach, voice-over: Historically, geothermal power has been limited to areas in the world with naturally occurring heat in the earth and groundwater.

But recently, there's been exciting work to see what's possible by using existing oil and gas wells.

Water can be pumped into the well, where it is heated by the Earth, then drawn back to the surface for power.

That's a huge opportunity, as the U.S. alone currently has vast amounts of abandoned, dry, or unproductive oil wells that can be repurposed, along with the human skillsets needed for this new work.

Kapatza, voice-over: So this is actually a reinjection borehole, and this is where we reinject the hot geothermal water that we have used back underground.

Wallach, voice-over: Like so many things, geothermal power is a big step forward, but it's not perfect.

There's still a small amount of CO2 being produced from the hot water being extracted.

So the team here has gotten creative about a way to capture the carbon resulting from the process and mineralize it into a rock substance that they inject back into the Earth itself.

Now, at the moment here in this powerplant, we are capturing around 12,000 tons per year of this CO2, and we mineralize it every year.

Wow.

Wallach: How much electricity does Iceland get from geothermal?

So we get around 750 megawatts of electricity from all this, mostly 8 geothermal powerplants throughout the country.

This is nearly 30% of our electricity coming up from geothermal.

The rest comes from hydroelectric.

Hmm.

So we are literally 100%, um, renewable electricity production over here.

-As a nation.

-Yeah.

Wallach, voice-over: I got to see the impact and opportunities created through geothermal energy close by, where a team of farmers are growing produce in the middle of winter.

Woman: Every day, we have something to pick in any greenhouse.

We are harvesting two tons of tomatoes every day of the year.

Wallach: Every day?

Woman: Every day of the year.

This is only one of 9 greenhouses, and that makes 40% here of the domestic market in Iceland.

You can see the white pipes here all around the glasshouses.

You find them also underneath the plants and above the plants.

This is actually our heating system.

And those pipes are connected to our own hot spring in the village.

And from there, we can take the water with a temperature of 90 to 95 degrees in Celsius inside the houses, and that's what we use for heating.

So the warmth that I'm feeling right now, the warmth that is growing tomatoes in the middle of winter in Iceland, is geothermal?

All the way geothermal.

It's just the hot water basically radiating the heat into the houses.

I think over there, you can try this one.

-Yeah.

-It looks good to me.

Oh, look at that.

I mean, this is-- when people say, like, a tomato straight from the vine, this is it, right?

Heh heh.

That's it.

-It's good?

-Yeah.

-Ha ha ha!

-Mmm!

That's amazing.

[Birds crying] Wallach: Being out here, traveling like this, is kind of mind-blowing.

To see these things, and feel these things, and meet with people who are all kind of, like, working on the edge, trying to make better futures for my kids, my grandkids-- it's just, like, inspiring.

But they're curious.

They're not sitting back and saying, like, I'm just going to let the future wash over me.

They're thinking, can I do it a different way?

Can it be better?

Can I make it better?

And then they're connecting it with, like, action.

And that curiosity is infectious, and that feels like a through line across the board.

The more I travel, the more I see how there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges we face.

This moment requires us to address multiple things at once.

And beyond creating cleaner, new forms of energy, there's still much to do in terms of identifying and reducing existing energy pollution.

So I came to Ball Aerospace in Boulder, where a team of scientists were preparing to launch a methane-tracking satellite into space.

It's like a smoke detector for the planet.

Methane is a colorless, odorless gas.

We can't see it with the naked eye, so the--they don't know it's a problem until we make the invisible visible.

You're part of a project called MethaneSAT.

What is that?

So MethaneSAT is the first time that an environmental NGO will be launching a satellite.

And what it's designed to do is globally map methane pollution-- primarily from oil and gas development, but also from landfills and agriculture as well-- and to then make that data actionable to the public.

What exactly is methane?

Methane is a super pollutant.

It's like this thick blanket that is very powerful.

It's 80% more potent than carbon dioxide.

And we're talking about an industry that has hundreds of thousands of wells just in the U.S., spread across very rural areas, often.

Limiting the methane that's being wasted, that's leaking out from these oil and gas well sites, is going to help us, you know, address that problem quickly and get that mitigated.

What was it like when the idea was first floated of a not-for-profit launching a satellite?

It's a game changer.

I mean, you're right.

It's--we're the first to do this.

We saw an opportunity to really fill this gap in the data.

Building from the science that we did here on Earth, going around and sampling these sites, if we wanted to bring that to scale, if we wanted to be able to see not just what's going on in the U.S. but what's going on around the world, we were going to need to think differently and to think bigger.

[Fan blowing] Wallach, voice-over: While I was there, we got to suit up so we could see the satellite itself in person.

A team of scientists have been hard at work here for over a year on what will be the first satellite of its kind.

Goldstein: Blows my mind to think about it, but this will be up in space.

Man: What you're looking at here on the top is going to be pointed down towards the Earth.

Yes.

We have one channel for methane, and we've got the oxygen channel.

The oxygen channel is helpful for us to correct some of the observations that we get.

Everything below that is the spacecraft bus, and that's what provides the power, the heat.

So as the satellite goes around the planet, they're always going to rotate to get maximum sun.

Yep.

That's how we keep consistent lighting conditions.

It's called a sun-synchronous orbit.

But obviously once it's up there, we're gonna want to keep flying it for as long as possible.

Wallach: So it won't just be the U.S. Goldstein: No.

And then what happens in other countries that are doing this, their citizens and their governments will be able to also see this data, because it's open and free.

That's absolutely right.

And so with MethaneSAT, we'll be able to say, like, what's going on in Russia, What's going on in Turkmenistan, you know, and other places where we get energy.

I think a lot about the world that our kids are gonna inherit, the problems that we're seeing already with climate impacts.

Methane is the way that we can really bend that curve as quickly as possible.

By cutting methane emissions, we can slow the rate of warming by up to 30%.

It's not to say that carbon dioxide isn't important.

It's incredibly important, too.

But we really need to do both, and we need to do them as quickly as possible.

Bratton: One of the ironies of this moment is that, in many respects, we know much more about how planetary systems work, how our own bodies work, where we are astronomically, than we have known at any other time in history.

And yet, it seems as though the ability of complex societies to deliberately, comprehensively, and effectively compose themselves, to govern themselves, to make things work isn't tracking.

There's an irony.

We know more but can do less.

Howe: We haven't taken a long-term view.

We've completely ignored the things that we know, with a fair degree of certainty in many cases, are coming down the track at us.

We work on these very sort of linear trajectories, in terms of what we measure.

And all of those things add up to a system which has this kind of terrible pull into the short-term, and very few incentives to look to the long-term.

Wallach: One thing we know is coming towards us-- an unprecedented amount of human migration due to the effects of climate change around the world.

And even though big long-term challenges like this have proven difficult for us to address, we now have, more than ever, a chance to rethink our societies and how we think about who gets to be a part of them.

Gaia Vince is an environmental journalist who has spent years arguing that not only are enormous shifts in migration already upon us, but also what we've been told is a geopolitical problem could in fact, if managed well, be a powerful opportunity.

So you wrote, "The great upheaval is coming."

What do you mean by that?

You know, the climate that we experience in our lives, and which our culture has been built on, it's really the fabric of everything we do.

And so when that changes, it means everything changes.

We're seeing drought, wildfires, flood.

And all these events, they are going to create unlivable regions across the planet, and the conditions are going to be so extreme that people are not going to be able to adapt.

They're going to have to move.

[Crowd yelling] [Child crying] So we're going to see an upheaval in terms of populations moving.

But at the same time, everywhere on Earth is going to have to adapt to these new conditions, even if they don't have to move.

You look at somewhere like Mumbai, which is home to around 30 million people, possibly more.

At least 9 million of those live in slum housing.

They will migrate.

They will try to migrate, because they will have no choice-- millions, perhaps billions of people.

Among the many choices we have, we can put up barriers.

We can send back boats of people fleeing disaster.

We've seen it doesn't work.

It's very expensive.

So what's-- what's your alternative to accepting people in?

Is it conflict?

Is it conscripting armies of young people to fight these people?

Because, you know, that's not the future that I would like to see, and I don't think that benefits anyone.

There are places where we can live, and there is plenty of room for all of us, especially if we get on with adapting it and create the societies we want.

There's this talk of, like, a clash of civilizations or a clash of cultures, this nomadic century that we're going into.

There's a worry that these cultures won't be able to work together.

They're just too different.

But--but you see culture somewhat differently.

Throughout history, the way that humans have resolved their problems is through technological adaptation and through social adaptation.

We work together.

We cooperate to solve problems.

If we don't do that, history shows us that leads to loss of life, economic destruction, and the loss of entire civilizations.

But when we do, brilliant things happen.

So the first thing we need to do, in my opinion, is look ahead.

Look ahead at the future and create that world first in your mind, because that's how everything is created.

What does a good Anthropocene look like?

For me, it's a place where nature is restored, where people have clean air, clean water, available food.

They have cheap, abundant energy, and they have opportunities for jobs in their city.

But we won't get there by accident.

We only get there by identifying what that vision is that we've shared and agreed on, and then what the steps are to get there.

Wallach, voice-over: I'm in Delhi, a vibrant city that's home to more than 32 million people.

I'm here to spend time with a local architect named Manas Bhatia, who has a unique vision for the future of this city.

He's honest about the very real challenges Delhi faces, but that's not stopping him from imagining something better.

Using new AI tools and techniques, he's working to completely reimagine the relationship between nature and the cities in which we live.

Wallach: So as I look at a lot of the work that you're doing now using AI, what fascinates me is the direction you're taking it.

What about nature do you think is so important to the work that you do?

I am from Dehradun, which is, like, a valley, and it is close to the Himalayas.

It's all very green and very, very beautiful.

So every day I would just go out by the riverside, go for a trek in the hills.

I would just sit there and with my sketchpad, and I would observe nature.

I can sort of imagine spaces in those patterns and in those, you know, wilted leaves.

Nature itself is a big inspiration for my projects that way.

I think the first time I moved to Delhi, I hated the place, I would say.

It was like a concrete jungle.

It was difficult to adjust at first.

Now, the entire idea is, how can I combine those two concepts so that the future of architecture and the future cities could be better than the current concrete jungles we are living in?

When we are being taught about architecture, every design starts with an idea.

And then the designer turns to tools like sketchpads, and, you know, pencils, and 3D softwares.

There was a tool which was lacking that could really help me envisioning my thoughts quickly, these visions which I had as an architect.

Finally, there is a tool which I can use to actually express myself.

Midjourney was something which could take the designs to a next level.

These are some of the explorations that I've currently been doing.

This is one of my favorite ones.

It's like a pavilion, which was inspired from bioluminescence.

There are other projects, as well.

It took the instructions from the parameters.

You can see how I've tried to show what it would look like if you were, you know, inside a hollowed-out tree.

So you could have those grand atrium spaces, and the staircases.

In theory, right now, we can't necessarily grow a tree like this.

But this could inform people who are working in synthetic biology.

You are showing them what this output could actually look like.

Right.

AI is here to stay.

It will be like your assistant in your design process all through the way, motivating designers to be more expressive and to experiment more.

Just break all the rules and, you know, think beyond the boundaries.

How do you feel Delhi is going to become a city of the future?

This will be one of those cities which will have to adapt very quickly.

The only solution here is to build more sustainably, to build towards a greener future.

If you look at nature, nothing is unnecessary.

Every pattern and every tree that grows in a particular way, it is following some rules, which we call as sacred geometry.

So the animals and the little creatures, they have been using the design principles, and they have been the real architects, I would say.

So if we start implementing those systems in nature into architecture, pick up all those logics and bits and pieces of information, and, you know, reimagine those systems, that kind of architecture is what we are all dreaming for.

A design... Wallach, voice-over: The future Manas and his team are dreaming about is beautiful, and it reminds me just how much creativity these new tools have the power to unleash.

Hoffman: I think that the artificial intelligence technology is the most important technology in my lifetime.

[Train whistle blows] It's kind of like a steam engine moment.

If you think back in history, the steam engine was a thing that completely changed the face of the Earth and face of society.

And what I think is going on now with artificial intelligence and scale computing is it's like the steam engine of the mind.

AI is an amplification of anything that you can do with an electronic device across all of life and all of work.

Bratton: You know, over the history of the course of the planet, life evolved at a particular point in time.

Much later on, wait a few billions of years, this life begins to become intelligent.

The intelligence of this life begins to transform the planet in its own image.

They were biological forms, they were animal forms, vegetal.

You could say the whole biosphere has a kind of intelligence.

But now the lithosphere is also intelligent.

We have learned to take rocks and metals and fold them in particular ways and run electric current through them.

And these rocks are now capable of feats of sentience and sapience that previously only apes, us, had been able to accomplish.

This is incredible.

The question is, what do we do with that?

The question is, what is this, you know-- really, what is this for?

Wallach, voice-over: My final visit is to a place called the Longplayer Lab, an old lighthouse that's been repurposed as a listening room for a unique piece of music.

What--what is Longplayer?

Longplayer, as it's called, is a piece of music composed by Jem Finer which lasts for 1,000 years without repetition and then starts again.

So, a continuous piece of music which encourages us to think about deep time, futures, hopes of futures, and the hope that there is actually a planet in which it can play into.

Wallach, voice-over: The initial score, written for a Tibetan singing bowl, is fed through an algorithm that constantly transposes it in multiple ways in order to play originally and without repetition.

It began playing in 1999 and will not finish until 2099.

Being here makes me wonder what the world will look like at that point.

So, it's the year 2099, December 31st.

It's been 1,000 years since Longplayer has been composing and performing.

What do you want the world to look like?

I guess I just really hope that there is a world enough for survival.

That doesn't just mean humans.

It means all kinds of species.

I hope there's a world that not just sustains but actively encourages joy and--and love and good feeling to each other.

Mbapp, voice-over: When you think about your future, you realize that you have always something more to do.

If you want to have success, we need us as a team.

We are one team, the world.

I cannot change the world alone, but I can do one step.

If everybody do one step, that will help us to grow like a team.

Hoffman: No technology is built entirely in a box and then deployed.

It's deployed, learned from, improved.

That's the society we should be designing to.

Go do it, try it, play with it, iterate it, develop it.

You know, my hope is that we are building these technologies to enable us to be more human.

Sam: Looking decades ahead, I actually think we're gonna find ourselves closer to what it really feels like to be a human, when there are thriving ecosystems, when there is incredible biodiversity, when we're closer to nature and establishing that harmony.

Bhatia: Humans are driven by the beauty.

So do we want our cities to be like pieces of concrete which we build up, serve the function, and then we destroy them?

Or do we want our future cities to be beautifully, aesthetically looking good?

Bidshahri, voice-over: Progress is about problem-solving.

It takes creativity, innovation, foresight, in order to imagine an exciting future for humanity first before you can create it.

Vince: These are very complex, interwoven, interconnected problems.

And at their heart is the way we operate as humans.

Howe: What are the consequences in the short, medium, and long-term for future generations?

When you apply this framework, then actually you do start coming up with different approaches.

Bratton: Here going forward, nothing's gonna be the same.

Whatever we do now over this period of the next couple decades is gonna set the foundations for a lot of what comes next.

Man: A and B speeds.

And the series finale, take one.

Mark.

Woman: B mark, stop six.

[Laughter] Wallach, voice-over: As this chapter of my journey comes to an end, it's difficult to describe the effect it's all had on me.

I set out in search of people who are making better futures, people who are building things, changing things, rewriting the story, reimagining what all this is for and where we can take it moving forward.

What I found is that this moment of chaos also holds the seeds of creativity, an opportunity to remake our world and write a bigger, better story about what it means to be human, remembering that whatever we face up ahead, we are in this together, not alone.

And at the end of it all, the feeling I'm left with most is not hope, but it's also not fear.

It's not a final greeting card statement that everything's gonna work out, nor is it a feeling that all is lost.

[Indistinct conversation] It's a feeling, a truly felt belief, actually, a belief that we have a choice, a choice to decide to become the great ancestors our future needs us to be.

What does it mean to be a great ancestor?

It means you make the decisions that ensure the future flourishing of generations to come.

We all have agency.

It can be how we consume, how we vote, how we talk to one another-- these very small actions that have long-term impacts.

If I was to be born at any time in the grand arc of human history, I'd want to be born right now, not some time in the far future when all the problems are solved and everything is unicorns and rainbows, but right now.

We're at this inflection point where we're gonna decide, really, the fate of our species.

What's so exciting about this moment is that we get to decide what happens.

What do we become?