Superstructing

Last month, the California-based Institute for the Future annouced Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. Here’s the (in game) press release;

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.

“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. “Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”

GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

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Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.

Now, I’ve landed myself a position on the Superstruct team as a Community Leader / Game Master, with responsibility for one of the five “superthreats”. As part of the application, they asked us to submit a brief vignette responding to the following:

It’s the summer of 2019. You are yourself, but 10 years in the future. Describe where you are having for dinner, what you’re eating, and what you’re thinking or talking about. How did you wind up there, compared to where you had dinner most often in the summer of 2008?

You can submit your own scenario as a comment over at the IFTF page. I got a lot out of Stuart and Guy‘s responses, both of which were globally-aware and delightfully disjunctive. In comparison to which, mine seemed downright parochial.

SPAG BOL

It’s been a week since my thirty-second birthday, and I’m having lunch with James – a friend from sixth form – at his house in rural Sussex. A stone’s throw from my parents’ place, the building is a beast of cob and plaster, situated in the grounds of a farmhouse built the best part of a century ago by James’ father.

There’s a certain symmetry here; a mirroring which I don’t think is lost on James. He’s been talking about the house since we finished university back in the late 2000s. Heck, I’d even tried to sustain his interest in Project Off-Grid in the face of his declaration of intent to join the British armed forces. Back then, I lost, but a couple of months after the final cessasion of hostilities, and James was back on the scene, brandishing the original sketches, and annoucing that Project Off-Grid was back on the cards. That was 2016, but it’s only now – after three years of paperwork and legal wrangling – that the structure is approaching completion

And, much as it pains me to say it, that’s no small thanks to our benevolent overlords. James is definitely committed to the low-impact lifestyle, and that’s definitely something that this lot want to encourage. New government, new priorities.

So here I am. This morning, I helped lay cabling out to the turbines (still wrapped in polythene). After dinner, we’re planning to tackle the internal walls. It’s a far cry from the hassles of the day job, and a welcome change of pace.

The magazine sent me away for the summer; said they couldn’t afford the risks of keeping us in the city. With the bitter memories of the air pollution scares of last August, seasonal resettlement subsidies from the GLA, and the threat of a lawsuit from a former employee, the big boss was all too willing to roll back our activities over the summer months. Central office is running on a rotating skeleton staff and, for the next five weeks, I’m working part-time. Telecommuting from the my parents’ back garden. And four day weekends mean more time to help out mates with their hare-brained building projects.

Lunch is a relatively relaxed affair – smothered in clay and sun lotion, we arrange the wobbly plastic deckchairs at a trestle table found lurking in some dingy outbuilding. In the absence of a proper electric oven, we prep the soy mince in tin foil, resting it in James’ solar cooker. The soy is supplemented with a hearty supply of locally-sourced seasonal veg, and some opaque and foul-smelling home-brew that I’m assured is (technically) cider. Luckily, it tastes better than it smells.

I’m too hot and tired for serious conversation, so drift from mindless chatter about college friends to suggesting surreal additions to the building project (“How about environmental sensors on some kind of tethered balloon? They wouldn’t cost that much, it’d help with the agricultural stuff, and we might even be able to get one of the universities to foot the … so, that’s definitely a no, then?”) as we wait for the soy to cook in a beam of concentrated sunlight.

It’s hardly restaurant fare, but the final meal – a loose analogue for Spaghetti Bolognese – is both edible and filling. As we finish up, I’m just about ready for an afternoon siesta. James, however, is loathe to lose my labour to the warm embrace of sleep. There’s still plastering to be done, and he pesters me until I relent.

Plenty of time for rest later.