Karl Schroeder on an Unapocalyptic Future

Karl Schroeder is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists and has his own consultancy. He is the Chair of the Canadian node of the Millennium Project, a private/public foresight consultancy active in 50 nations, and an award-winning author with ten published novels translated into as many languages. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Karl Schroeder. Thank you to Jerome C. Glenn for the recommendation and for connecting us. I’m currently interviewing a few futurists. There are many, but I can only do a few right now. How did you get into futurism? Or, as Jerome informed me, that might be a troublesome term. How did you come to define yourself as a futurist? 

Karl Schroeder: The non-problematic term these days seems to be “strategic foresight.” When you think about a futurist in terms of the future, ideas of prophecy, prediction, and things like that come up. Foresight, on the other hand, is about being prepared. That is a much easier pill for many people to swallow. That said, I come to this from the least reputable possible direction. I’ve been a published science fiction writer for about 30 years. I had just finished or published mysecond novel—or my third, if you count the one I wrote with my colleague David Nickle—my second solo novel in 2002 when I started getting invited to attend foresight conferences hosted by the National Research Council in Ottawa.

Initially, I was brought into these conferences as a “spoiler.” Imagine a room full of government bureaucrats, quants, technocrats, and scientists, all of whom have been trained their entire lives never to speculate. They’ve just been brought together at a conference and are asked to speculate about the future. Having someone in the room who is guaranteed to be wackier than they are—a professional science fiction writer—was a great way to break the ice. I called those my “dancing bear” performances when I was brought in to be the wackiest person in the room.

But after a few of these, I started getting invited back as a participant and facilitator. I began to do more serious work around helping to frame scenarios and doing the advanced work ahead of foresight engagements. I got to know Jack Smith, who was the leader of the foresight effort in Ottawa, quite well. From there, I did some consulting. Around 2009, I undertook a master’s program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University in Toronto. Now, I have a master’s degree in foresight.

I’ve done that as a complement to my science fiction writing. They don’t exactly inspire one another—they’re different—but they work together quite well. I’ve learned much about how to do one from doing the other.

Jacobsen: You were contacted by the Canadian Armed Forces to write a book? The crisis in Zefra is such an unusual request. How were you even on their radar for writing this?

Schroeder: I don’t even know. If you think about it, it’s unsurprising that the Canadian Armed Forces would have a presence in Ottawa for foresight work. So, again, around 2003-2004, I attended conferences where people from the armed forces were in attendance, and I got to know some of them. I developed a reputation around that time as someone who could work in two worlds. I was approached by the army around 2003 to do the first of what turned out to be three short novels based on foresight work that the Canadian military had done. They have always done foresight work.

The armed forces are all about strategic planning. If you haven’t planned, you won’t win the war. The armed forces had developed some fairly forward-looking scenarios. Still, they wanted to try a new method of communicating these to staff officers, junior officers, and those in officer training. They hadn’t done this kind of thing for decades.

A few foresight fiction stories were written for the Canadian army about 100 years ago. They knew my reputation and had a process in mind. So we sat down, and I put together a book called Crisis in Zefra; Zefra is a mythical African city-state where Canadian peacekeepers are deployed in this story. It was a great opportunity to test many ideas about deploying narrative techniques in foresight that I’d been thinking about for some years. Zefra was extremely successful.

I’m told it’s quite popular with the US Marine Corps. It is publicly accessible online. All you have to do is search for it. 

Jacobsen: Outside of the national defence, there’s one word I came across. I didn’t know what the heck that was. It was trans-doggism. What is that?

Schroeder: Trans-doggism is my satire on transhumanism.

Jacobsen: Interesting. So, what makes transhumanism an appropriate target for satire? Is it the whole idea or just part of it?

Schroeder: That’s a rabbit hole we could fall quite far down. Transhumanism assumes that we can see what it would mean to transcend humanity from our current perspective. I invented the idea of transformism to illustrate this problem. If you asked a dog what it would mean to become a transdog, a superdog, or a post-dog, what would a dog answer? They would say, “Obviously, we transdoggists will be able to run at 100 miles an hour. We’ll be able to bite the hubcap off of a car. We’ll be able to pee infinite amounts and scent-mark everything in the neighbourhood.” In other words, a dog would not think of its transcendence in anything but dog terms. Friedrich Nietzsche satirized This concept about 140 years ago in a book called Human, All Too Human. The idea that we, as we are now, could even imagine what would be better than us is just an illustration of how limited we are.

So, yes, this was something that came up about 15 years or so ago when transhumanism was in vogue. I wanted to skewer it, so I did. These days, I’m neither a transhumanist nor a humanist. I call myself a posthumanist because I am equally interested in the fates of all the other species on Earth as I am in humanity’s. I’m not interested in transcendence.

Jacobsen: What have been the responses to the satire, and which ones have been valid about the point you’re making with the satire?

Schroeder: If the transhumanist community knows about me at all, I think they’re just quietly ignoring it.

Jacobsen: You have a newsletter. What is it called? What is typically in it for interested readers?

Schroeder: My newsletter is called Unapocalyptic. The URL is kschroeder.substack.com. It is about several things, but primarily, it’s about the intersection of science fiction and foresight and how each discipline can learn from the other.

Aside from that, it is also about earned optimism, which is how to be optimistic about our future at this moment in time while not ignoring or downplaying how serious the world situation is. You earn optimism by acknowledging bad things and doing the necessary work to improve things. There are a lot of different domains in which things are pretty bad—climate change, resource overshoot issues, political instability, international tensions, nuclear tensions—I could go on and on. However, there are possibilities for optimism in these areas if we work to make them real. That’s the other thing the newsletter is about.

Jacobsen: What areas of technology won’t necessarily lead to transcendence but will be powerful in providing great convenience for all of us? Something that most people will likely agree on outside of a subpopulation of Luddites.

Schroeder: We now face a situation where several technological strands are weaving together and influencing one another. So, we are at a point where renewable energy, the electrification of industry, and technologies such as vertical farming and precision fermentation all suggest an impending revolution in food production. Agriculture itself may not even remain the dominant player in how we feed ourselves in the future. I’m toying with the idea of writing a newsletter piece right now called “Banning Agriculture” as a provocation.

Jacobsen: That is provocative. Also, it’s provocative in the sense of puzzling. What do you mean by that?

Schroeder: Right now, we’re using about 2.5 Earth’s resources. About 40 to 60% of the Earth’s landmass is given over to agricultural production, which is unsustainable and a recipe for mass extinction. So we have to do something else. We can do different things—precision fermentation being one of them. Using the same technologies that we use to create beer, for instance, to create almost any other food you can imagine by genetically engineering microorganisms to create the molecules, proteins, fats, and so on we require. There are already companies coming online that are producing butter and, soon, something indistinguishable from cow’s milk via precision fermentation.

Each of these companies can produce the equivalent of thousands of hectares of farmland worth of product in small, essentially industrial facilities, but it’s indistinguishable from what you get from the field. So, it is a no-brainer to go in this direction, particularly if we can create tasty products with the right mouthfeel as original agricultural products. The result is a much smaller footprint of humanity on the Earth, which we need to achieve in the 21st century.

Jacobsen: What about stacking of farmland?

Schroeder: That’s part of it too. The thing about looking at the future is that it’s easy to fixate on one thing and say, “What happens when this develops?” We do this with, let’s say, electric cars or eVTOLs (electric flying passenger vehicles), and we wonder, “What’s the impact of flying passenger vehicles on the design of cities?” You can find all manner of foresight studies out there on one or another technology and how it might change our lives. The problem is that all of these things get developed at once. They all come online at once, and they all influence each other. It becomes extremely difficult to talk about the future, say, 20 years down the line, when we have a fully renewable grid with electrification and batteries, eVTOLs, electric self-driving cars, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, precision fermentation, and catastrophic global warming—all at once. It’s essentially impossible to look at the future by examining these things in isolation. But it’s also extremely difficult to envision the future simultaneously with all these factors. So, foresight has become an increasingly difficult discipline to practice due to the acceleration of all these simultaneous changes.

Jacobsen: I’ll combine two ideas that you have written about. When it comes to the workplace of the 2030s and digital currencies, how will technological change influence how we work? How will cryptocurrency potentially influence how we trade? Could some of these influences intersect, such as companies paying employees in some form of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies?

Schroeder: That’s different. Right. When we talk about cryptocurrencies, the future of work, and the future of the economy, we’re now on the ground where I can speak both as a futurist and as a science fiction writer because my last novel, Stealing Worlds, was set in the early 2030s in the United States where all of these technologies and trends have converged. A new form of economics is being created. It’s not capitalism. It’s not socialism. It’s something else. The way I put it in the book is if in capitalism, the capitalist owns the means of production, and in communism, the workers own the means of production; in my system, the means of production own themselves. It is an AI-driven economy in which resources and technical systems are, in a sense, awake. They’re stakeholders. They can help decide the course and direction of companies, marketing campaigns, and essentially everything. There is an underground version of this based on blockchain technology. Blockchain was cool in 2017 when I was writing about this stuff. It’s used in the book to create the digital equivalent of permanent, unique objects.

Once you have such digital uniqueness, you can monetize it and create unique objects and items that can be owned, traded, and used in marketplaces where businesses can grow. In this novel, I have an augmented reality, massively multiplayer role-playing universe called the Frame Worlds, in which all of these systems converge to create a parallel underground economy that our main character flees into at the beginning of the book. This novel allowed me to take ideas I’ve been working on in foresight and apply them in a fictional setting. Before that, most of my novels had been set in the far future. Because Stealing Worlds is set right around the corner, I could directly apply what I learned in foresight studies to storytelling.

Jacobsen: And it worked?

Schroeder: Yes, it worked. 

Jacobsen: A lot of futurist thinking is academic or abstract. I’m gathering from your narrative that you’re not just in contact with the military or coordinating with the Obama White House; you’re also having more practical impacts because you’re working with mainstream institutions that influence young people. What feedback do you get from younger people starting their careers in science, technology, politics, and policymaking about these ideas?

Schroeder: I have inspired some people to go into foresight, which is quite gratifying. However, I am very careful when laying down the boundaries of my expertise. I’m a generalist and, therefore, an expert in nothing.

Jacobsen: You sound like a journalist.

Schroeder: As a professional storyteller, I essentially lie for my dinner. So, I’m careful to tell people not to take the things I say or my ideas as recommendations, likelihoods, or even things I necessarily believe in. That’s why I use the term “provocation.” I often want to get people to think, and I don’t want them to think the way I’ve been thinking because I’ve already done that. So, we need other minds and other voices.

So, yes. I’m at pains to play down any expertise on my part, but I encourage people to look into foresight and related disciplines, regardless of where they’re working and what their job is. Because there’s essentially no area of life where looking to the future isn’t useful, whether personal or professional. People talk about augmented cognition a lot. We work with devices with many apps to do shortcuts for much of our thinking.

Jacobsen: Even the use of a calculator, technically, is an aid to cognition, where it handles complex mathematical algorithms to help us with much of this stuff. When you think of augmented cognition, what are you thinking of outside of normal applications that we take for granted now?

Jacobsen: That’s a good question, and it touches on one of the themes I’ve been writing about in the Unapocalyptic newsletter. That theme is getting past what I call the science fiction of the 1900s and thinking about what science fiction would look like if it were written using only ideas taken from the 21st century.

There is an idea developed in the 1990s and into this century by Francisco Varela and, I think, Humberto Maturana, who were Chilean systems thinkers. It’s called activism or inaction. What you discussed—augmented cognition—is closely related to that and extended mind theory and distributed cognition. These areas of cognitive science are growing based on the idea that human thinking does not happen just inside the skull. We actively think using our devices, paper, pens, Post-it notes we put on the walls, and everything around us—that our constructed environment is, in fact, part of our mind in an almost literal sense. Right now, we use computers to extend our thinking, and we’re used to that.

The phone is a computer, but I’ve been thinking lately: Could we redesign our entire built environment to act as an extended mind? To an extent, it already is. How could we make that even better? In doing so, they make computers themselves obsolete. Then you’re wandering straight into science fiction territory.

You can play with those ideas and explore the dividing line between foresight speculation and what becomes science fiction speculation. This is where the potential disreputability of what I do becomes obvious.

Because there is a dividing line. At some point, thinking about cities built as thinking aids does shade into science fiction. However, extended mind theory is not science fiction, and it seems clear that we use our devices and built environments to help us think. This can be positive or negative if those devices are not controlled because they can be used to make us think what other people want us to think. So, there is much to unpack and potentially a whole other novel.

Jacobsen: Do you have any final thoughts based on the conversation today?

Schroeder: Other than that, I encourage anyone interested in foresight to look into it. A while ago, I gave up on the idea that foresight is about looking at the future. To me, the future is not about time. Foresight is about looking at surprise; the future is the dimension of surprise. Suppose you think about studying surprise, learning to anticipate it in your own company, institution, or life, and how to forestall it and inflict it on your competitors. In that case, foresight looks much more useful, interesting, and fun. So, I encourage anyone interested to go down that route and study it with an open mind and an eye to possibilities that don’t necessarily have to do with prediction.

Jacobsen: Karl, thank you so much for your time today. And also, thank you to Jerome.

Jacobsen: Yes. I will thank him the next time I talk to him.

Schroeder: Awesome. I’ll send him a note, too.

Jacobsen: All right. Good luck with your second tour. I hope it’s productive and you return safe and sound.

Schroeder: As do I.

Jacobsen: All right. Thank you.

Schroeder: Thank you, Scott.

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Photo by Semeon Hrozian on Unsplash