Shaping the Future @ Visionary Days 2019
According to you, how’s going to be our planet in 30, 50, 100 years?
What kind of economic system should we encourage between existing ones or should we have to redesign the way we intend the market?
How could we improve the way we exploit planet’s resources?
Will we satisfy the need of each individual considering a constantly growing population on this Earth or shall we focus on searching a new home for mankind?
These were questioning that 1500 young people, from 18 up to 35 years old, made themselves at Visionary Days. The event, at its 3rd edition, held at the OGR (Officine Grandi Riparazioni) in Turin and Palazzo Ducale in Genoa (unfortunately, Genoa’s event was cancelled due to weather alert) was thought by a group of young people (undergraduates, PhD students, workers) which wanted to create for their contemporaries an event where to share our visions and confront each other about the coming future. This event is growing year-by-year in terms of participants, locations and partners: Reply is proudly one of them!
This year I could (finally) attend in Turin alongside with some other Reply Ambassadors from Milan and Turin. We were asked to answer to the questions I have written above and more others have been added during the whole day. The case study was “What shapes for the new planet?”.
But let’s start from the beginning.
Each one of the 800 people in Turin were assigned randomly to one of the 100 tables in the hall. To each table was also assigned a moderator who had to help the participants during discussion phases that followed 15-minutes talks about a specific topic of the whole theme. We started at 10.30 AM and we finished at 7 PM (lunch included): it was an incredible roller-coaster of knowledge and discussions.
How speakers inspired us
The first three talks in the morning were held by Gabriella Greison (Physics Festival director, writer, authoress and theatrical actress), Duccio Canestrini (anthropologist, journalist and writer) and Massimiliano Tellini (Circular Economy person in charge for Intesa San Paolo IC).
Mrs. Greison’s speech was about resources, in particular, water. Water meant both as source of life and cause of death, constantly flowing and re-inventing itself in its circle of existence. She reported the result of one of Masaru Emoto’s researches that showed how water is contaminated by the environment not only physically but also “mentally”: water saves a record of its route and it comes clear after its freezing. Mr. Canestrini talked about inhabitants and population’s growth. It’s a topic strictly related to resources’ consumption because, according to him, leaving the Earth is not an option but we have to take advantage of our knowledge to save our planet. Re-thinking our society as it is nowadays may be an option. As Jean Jacques Rousseu wrote:
The first man ever to fence off a land and to have the idea to claim, ‘That’s mine!’ […] He was the true founder of civil society
Lastly, Mr. Tellini stressed out the importance of changing our economic model, migrating from “linear economy” to “circular economy”. This means not just to think how to recycle a product, but re-design it from the beginning in order that recycling is part of its lifecycle.
After lunch Amedeo Balbi (astrophysicist, scientific adviser and essayist) completed the 4 topics of the day showing how is, practically, impossible to colonise a new planet where to start a new mankind. Venus has an atmosphere composed in majority by carbon dioxide resulting in an incredible pressure (100 times bigger than Earth’s one) and greenhouse effect with an average superficial temperature of 500° C; Mars’ atmosphere, on the contrary, is rarefied and so, despite being not so cold (-16° C on average), the planet is overexposed to radiation that will make impossible to live there for a long period. And these two are the only planets in Solar system that can be compared to Earth, other than we should search in other systems or galaxies. Again: we have no plan B.
The last three speakers were Paul Kapteijn (Reply’s Senior Manager), Giorgio Neri and Daniele De Luca (Fiat 500 family region EMEA person in charge; FCA Strategic Alliances, M&A, Development and Business director). Their talks were focused on cities’ future changes from logistic, security and sustainability to transports. Mr. Kapteijn recalled us the importance of 3 drivers of the future revolution: sensors, IoT and IA/ML. First results of Sidewalks Labs in Toronto showed the increase of efficiency, but one question remains: how we could develop these instruments without losing focus from the concept of “community”? Mr. Neri and De Luca made a link with the previous talk of Mr. Tellini concerning re-thinking from zero a product. Re-design means of transport implies betting on electrification, therefore in e-mobility.
How we planted these seeds
Our discussion (following each talk) was based on three phases: critical phase, utopic phase and realistic phase or, as it was called, “grounding phase”.
Critical
The focus was pointed on our economic system and its cultural fundamentals. It’s an inherited model that was never drastically changed and innovated. Therefore, now we’ve reached the breaking point and is urgent to isolate the pros of this model and fix the cons. First of all, it’s necessary to stop exploiting Nature and increase our effort to use renewable sources.
The new generation claims its rights and its place on Earth. A healthy and knowing place that will exist in 20, 30 50 years. [from Visionary Days’ Manifesto]
Secondly, we must underline that sustainability rhymes with awareness. We have to keep in mind that the more all the facilities make our lives handier, the more they have an environmental impact. Can we give up some of this comfort to help our planet? The cohabitation between mankind and nature should reflect our future society: we should work on growing the sentiment of being part of a planetary community. Politics (both national and international) has a role in this process too: to finance researches, to re-think and remodel infrastructures and to propose new and alternative mobility and working models. So, linear economy is a model that must be passed: sharing economy is not enough if limited to metropolis or specific commodities and circular economy mustn’t be a culmination but a starting point.
It’s up to big companies to embrace and promote this new vision, keeping in mind that progress and to enhance life’s quality can’t be measured with GDP. [from Visionary Days’ Manifesto]
Utopic
In the second phase we were allowed to fly with our imagination and process solutions that may be idealistic but effective. One recurrent idea was the “death of I” replaced by a collective “we” that implies the extreme sharing of commodities that can also be expressed as the birth of a new human identity.
Essential commodities needed to restart are water, electricity and humbleness. [from Visionary Days’ Manifesto]
“Utopic” ideas spread from a) switching USA Ministry of Defence (700b $) and NASA (20b $) budget (with the intent of demilitarising the world), b) building an engine running at 1/10 of c and exploring the universe in a short time, c) doing away with money as medium of exchange, d) altering DNA to be completely rational to avoid mistakes, e) “printing” food with a 3D printer. These are just some examples, but let’s analyse how these ideas were brought back to Earth.
Grounding
The next and impending transformation we’re going to face regards urbanisation and the creation of smart cities. That leads us to the problem of data processing. The first issue is security: it’s too early to let IA completely govern every system? The question rises considering that training datasets are set by humans and it’s not rare to have errors or, worse, these datasets could be built discriminating an ethnicity or gender (as happened with Google Translate algorithm). As a consequence, what do we have to learn? That all these technologies mustn’t replace not only the single individual, but the sense of community. To grant this equilibrium, it has been proposed to create an international organisation that defend human rights from the abuse of such sensitive information. The example of Sidewalks Labs in Toronto (see Paul Kapteijn’s talk) showed the radical change in the way we move through cities that we’ll be bigger and bigger in next years.
Before theorising new Smart City paradigms, it’s necessary to think again mobility. E-mobility, in that sense, becomes a great challenge firstly because an electric car shouldn’t become a luxury commodity and, secondly, not considering batteries recycling and keeping of charging them using electricity produced from carbon or oil will make this effort useless. An important role will be played by medias too: conveying news in a transparent way and promoting innovations in every field will be crucial because this challenge opens up to a battle that is not only technological but, above all, also cultural.
Final inspirations
In the last hours of the event our brainstorming work has been summed up by Lee, the artificial intelligence that, since morning, was helping the organisers in elaborating our visions in order to create a book, the Manifesto, that contained everything’s been said during the day. The Manifesto was printed in late afternoon and a copy was given to each participant. In the end besides all the institutional figures (among which Turin’s Mayor Chiara Appendino) the event was closed by an interview to the Italian Minister for Young Policies Vincenzo Spadafora, a summary talk by journalist Andrea Daniele Signorelli and an inspirational speech by Linda Raimondo (physics student, television speaker) who’s already been involved in ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA projects and dreams to land on Mars one day.
This is just an extract of my experience at Visionary Days: the complete report written in the Manifesto will be soon available on the official website. While you’re reading this article it’s time to think about what are the new challenges that are waiting for us. For sure we’ll have to question ourselves on ethics and community’s values related to the technology revolution. This may be the next topic of Visionary Days: the meeting is scheduled for next 21st November 2020, not only in Turin and Genova but in other 3 Italian cities too (to be announced).
