FutureProofing: Recent Episodes
BBC Radio 4
Series examining the implications - social and cultural, economic and political - of the big ideas that are set to transform the way society functions
Will 21st century technology avert or accelerate the Apocalypse?
Humanity has always featured stories and fears about the end of the world. But never before have we possessed such power to influence the dangers, manage the risks or cause such existential disaster.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson travel to NASA’s Los Angeles laboratory, and the site of the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl to understand the risks of disaster that face us in the next century. They discover how artificial intelligence might accelerate the demise of humankind, whilst also offering us a pathway to survival and redemption. And they learn how titanium wafers containing the entire library of human achievement and knowledge could safeguard our civilisation in the farthest corners of the universe.
How the home will be disrupted and transformed by radical technological change.
Our homes may experience more disruption than anywhere else because of the forces unleashed by technological change. The notions we have about home - a private, secure, stable place where you can shut out the world and just be yourself - are under threat from technology and economic change.
From the internet of things and the Smart Home, to the complete rejection of any permanent fixed abode, FutureProofing hears how our ideas about home will be transformed in the 21st century.
Presenters Leo Johnson and Timandra Harkness discover what impact technology will have on expanding - or contracting - opportunities for different sections of society in future. From a tough council estate in north London, to the labs at Harvard University developing tools to expand and augment human brain power, FutureProofing investigates how technology is set to alter the landscape of opportunity for millions in the 21st century. Algorithms could discriminate far more against different sections of the population, just as the network effects and low costs of entry might create huge new openings for people previously excluded from economic success. And the opportunities opened up by a revolutionary brain implant being developed in the USA could transform everyone's life chances in future.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert
Reality itself is changing - how will we experience and understand reality in future? Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson discover different ways to experience reality as technology develops and great progress is made in our understanding of how the brain works. Visiting the designers who are creating powerful and immersive virtual worlds and characters in California, FutureProofing learns how far our everyday experience will be mediated by the virtual in the next few decades. And how far extra layers of information will augment reality for us. Leading thinkers Jaron Lanier and Karl Friston reveal the potential of this new technology and how our brains will cope with a world that is increasingly unreal in future.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert
How does the global fashion industry worth more than a trillion dollars a year meet the disruption and upheaval that technological and social change now pose?
Fashion carries not only the livelihoods of millions of workers, but has become a major cultural force which shapes and supports individual and community identity. Presenters Leo Johnson and Timandra Harkness find out how this huge global business aims to meet the challenges posed by technological developments, environmental threats and social changes which could spell the end for fashion as we have known it.
FutureProofing meets designers, technology wizards, and those who influence and shape tomorrow's trends from across the globe.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
How can we protect and improve our mental health in future? FutureProofing explores how we might achieve healthier minds, and whether far greater understanding of the way our brains work will be enough to treat mental illness and enhance mental health in the 21st century. In Silicon Valley, presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson discover the cutting edge technology that aims to revolutionize diagnosis and treatment. They learn about the prospect of mind control and pervasive tracking to monitor how well millions of people are functioning mentally in future. And they find out why our understanding of and attitudes towards mental health must change significantly, if we are to meet the challenge of what appears to be an explosion of mental ill health around the world.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
FutureProofing presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson find out what might happen when we properly understand animals and how much our relationship with them will change in future. They meet elephants in California, learn about "talking" dolphins in Florida, and discover the technological possibilities that could completely transform what we think of and how we act towards animals in future. From the possibilities of enhancing animals with technology, to ending all farming and finding a new way to grow animal protein that would do away with all slaughter, could the future herald greater equality between sentient creatures on our planet? Will humans and animals develop a partnership of equals?
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
FutureProofing presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson put their faith - and lack of faith - to the test in a journey from the Middle East to Silicon Valley, to find out how technology is disrupting the beliefs and practices of traditional faiths. They also discover how data and tech might provide the foundations for what influential thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari have dubbed a 'New Religion' for the 21st century and beyond. FutureProofing: Faith includes encounters with leading thinkers such as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks; a leading member of President Trump's Evangelical Advisory Panel Robert Jeffress; and the world's most prominent humanist Professor Stephen Pinker. They reveal how traditional faiths and secularists are facing the challenge from technology. As the potential of technology to both explain the universe and deliver incredible power develops. so many of the features and promises we have found in older religions are being provided for and challenged by tech. From mind-uploading which offers the prospect of immortality and resurrection to algorithms that could suggest exact optimum life choices for us according to our genes and social circumstances. FutureProofing's presenters learn how the functions of religion could be taken over by technology and the search for the meaning of life be challenged by the accelerating pace of science. Are data and technology about to supplant the traditional sources of faith and information about ultimate meaning in our world? And will this mean a very different kind of faith emerges in future?
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Will sin disappear in future, as technology and a better understanding of human behaviour allow us to stop people from sinning before they act? And if sin does disappear, what would the consequences be? FutureProofing presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson find out how technology is changing our understanding of morality, and how social changes may create the circumstances for radically different moral values in future.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Discover how small things will significantly shape the future. From sub-atomic particles to small data and small politics, the small will affect the future in a big way. Presenters Leo Johnson and Timandra Harkness explore the world of the tiniest things, and learn about the power they hold to transform manufacturing, computers and the chances of artificial intelligence emerging in the next few decades. The programme explores how human society might be changed by the growing influence of small politics and the application of small data, and unlocks the secrets of the quantum universe.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
How will we become wealthy in future? Presenters Leo Johnson and Timandra Harkness journey to New York and the Arabian Gulf to discover how our understanding of wealth is changing. They explore new definitions of wealth, and find out how old money plans to hang on to its wealth in the face of challenges from technology and social tensions between generations.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Healthcare is being transformed by technology. Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson discover what the future really holds for how we look after our health. Visiting the Silicon Valley technologists and cutting-edge medical research facilities, Leo explores the ambitions they have to bring science-fiction style health aids and treatments to millions of people, and how they are working to try and put an end to all infectious diseases. Timandra experiences the latest in remote control doctor surgeries in Dubai, and discovers the hugely significant part that your health data will play in shaping the future of healthcare for everyone.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
What would it really be like to live on other planets, and what are the implications of humans colonising space?
Living in space is becoming a real prospect, as plans develop for mass space travel and discoveries are made of environments that can support life on other worlds.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson travel to NASA's main space habitation research facility in Virginia, USA, to find out how humans might actually colonise deep space. They also learn about the search for alien intelligence, how private industry plans to harvest the resources of other planets, and why settling in space could offer us all a very different model of society in future.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Does the accelerating pace of technology change the way we think about the future?
It's said that science fiction writers now spend more time telling stories about today than about tomorrow, because the potential of existing technology to change our world is so rich that there is no need to imagine the future - it's already here. Does this mean the future is dead? Or that we are experiencing a profound shift in our understanding of what the future means to us, how it arrives, and what forces will shape it?
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson explore how our evolving understanding of time and the potential of technological change are transforming the way we think about the future.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson investigate the future of sport in the digital age. How will physical activity and organised sport be viewed in the years to come?
FutureProofing looks at how new technology could change not just what it means to be an athlete but also athletes' actual bodies, and asks what role sports will play in our culture in the decades ahead.
Producer: Faizal Farook.
Art may not survive the 21st century as a separate, meaningful category - according to one of the UK's foremost art teachers. Both cultural change and massively increased accessibility to the tools with which to create will have a huge impact on the nature of art itself. Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson explore the impact that technological change will have on art, and speak to artists at the forefront of the digital revolution.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Presenters Leo Johnson and Timandra Harkness discover how new forms of city living could dominate the 21st century. How will our cities look and feel, and what will life be like in the transformed cities of the future?
Current forecasts indicate that as many as 70% of the world's population will be living in cities by 2030, up from around 55% today. FutureProofing examines the big shifts in our societies that may follow from the rapid growth in urban living, and what the digital revolution will bring to the way cities are designed and governed. The programme visits Singapore to experience some of the features which cities of the 21st century may adopt, such as self-driving vehicles and ubiquitous data monitoring of all residents' movements. Will this reduce or enhance the freedom of citizens in future?
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Presenters Leo Johnson and Timandra Harkness discover how our society will change when machines do most of the work. What happens when automation becomes very widespread at work? Current economic forecasts from even cautious places like the Bank of England and the World Bank suggest that very large numbers of people will be affected when many jobs are automated in the next 50 years. FutureProofing examines the big shifts in our societies that may follow widespread adoption of machines in every category of jobs in future. The programme visits Singapore to learn how their ambitious plans could soon convert many jobs into ones done by robots.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson investigate how intimacy will change in the 21st century. Can intimacy survive the erosion of privacy within our culture? FutureProofing reveals how new technology offers opportunities to support and develop close personal relationships, but also how it threatens to radically change what we understand as intimacy and how we manage it in future.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Technology threatens to transform warfare more than almost any other human activity. But what does the future of war look like in the 21st century?
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson hear from those helping to design and build new weapons systems, experts in military strategy and defence policy, and those like veteran war photographer Don McCullin who have experienced the full horror of war, to explore what might change when the technology revolution of today is applied to the conflicts of the century ahead.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Will technology enable us to communicate in all languages in future, or will we all be using just one? FutureProofing discovers the future of language and finds out how we may not need it all.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson explore the growing influence that technology exerts on the evolution of language, and discover the new words we may be using, and the new ways we might be using them in the 21st century and beyond.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
New research points to a future where we can artificially create and manipulate memory inside our own heads. What are the implications when we can control memory in this way, and why is it so important to our future?
FutureProofing travels to California to meet the neuro-scientists creating the means for us to make and control memories inside the human brain, and to hear what the future holds when we can manipulate the process of forming and storing memories.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson also explore the implications of having our memories distributed in many places - a development that is gathering pace as we increasingly use the internet as the repository of our lives - from social media to cloud storage and all our online shopping data.
And the programme visits Jerusalem to discover how both Israelis and Palestinians are meeting the challenge of creating and maintaining memorials and museums which not only preserve their history but also offer a relevant guide to future generations.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
If new energy sources offer cheap, plentiful power to everyone, how will the planet cope? FutureProofing examines a new method of power generation promising clean, limitless power for everyone. Can it work, what are the consequences, and is there a viable alternative?
Fusion has long-promised cheap, clean and limitless power, but over half a century of effort this technology has still not delivered an operational power plant. Now hopes are high that a vast project in the south of France will finally crack the problems and deliver a working model that can be replicated around the world. FutureProofing presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson travel to Provence to find out what the prospects are for a scheme costing upwards of £10billion which could transform the energy supply for us all and with it global geo-politics and the environment for centuries to come.
The programme explores what viable alternatives there could be to generate power at the same scale for billions of people across the world, and whether such an alternative is a better route to achieving the goal of cheap, plentiful and clean energy for the future.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Who will be on top in the world of future crime - the cops or the criminals? How will crime change and what can be done to prevent it in future? Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson explore how crime and punishment will change in the 21st century.
They discover how crime and technology combine to create a toxic mix of threats and vulnerabilities in the next few decades. As criminals swiftly adopt and adapt emerging technologies to enable them to stay one step ahead of anyone trying to combat crime, the programme examines what kind of crimes this might lead to, and how it might be possible to stop offenders in future. New technology also holds out the prospect of radically different kinds of punishment, as well as significant developments in the understanding of how and why crime happens.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Should we retire the concept of 'ageing'?
The first episode of the new series of FutureProofing explores the technology and demography which herald a revolution in our ideas about ageing, and a fundamental shift in the expectations we all have for the course our lives might take.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson travel to California to meet the scientists at the cutting edge of the quest to stop age-related illness and decline. And they explore the ideas that will have to change if we all live to 150 and beyond.
Even conservative estimates now place human lifespan for new-borns today in a developed country at more than 100. FutureProofing examines the fundamental changes to our expectations, hopes and dreams which ensue from the scientific work taking place now to postpone, or even end, ageing.
FutureProofing is a six part series which explores the ideas that will shape our future. Episodes in the second series for April-June 2016 include programmes on the future of Ageing, Crime, Energy, Memory, Language and War.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
How will we move from place to place in future? Will speed and freedom always be the goal? FutureProofing examines how huge changes in mobility will alter our world. From driverless vehicles to personal flying machines, and from new apps that can summon any transportation option necessary at an affordable price to the linkage of two cities hundreds of miles apart in journeys of just a few minutes - presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson discover how changes in the ways we move around might alter our understanding of freedom, change cultures, and transform economies in future. FutureProofing travels to Ferrari's HQ to drive the latest model and hear how this could be the real future for the car; meets the men planning to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco by Hyperloop technology which achieves speeds of up to 750 mph; and discovers how the city of Helsinki is about to totally revolutionise transport for everyone. And the programme reveals what James May thinks we will lose if such changes really take hold. Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson look at their belongings, and those of others, with fresh eyes as they ask - is ownership over? It may be a central pillar of most societies, but in the future will people still want to own so much stuff if they can easily share?
Financial constraints and increased awareness of the planet's finite resources may mean a new generation is prizing access and experience over belongings. The growing tech revolution can provide the digital platforms to make this possible. FutureProofing unpicks the consequences: Will we see a shift in our attitudes towards owning physical objects? What will be the implications of the new ideas economy? And can objects own themselves?
The programme tackles these subjects with the help of writer Rachel Botsman, Daan Weddepohl of Peerby, software developer Mike Hearn, psychology lecturer Sheila Cunningham, journalist Paul Mason, the residents of Christiania in Copenhagen, and the comedian George Carlin with his routine on 'stuff'.
Producer: Marnie Chesterton.
Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson taste some strange foods of the future, as they investigate how technology and a rising global population might transform what we eat.
With a predicted two billion extra mouths to feed by 2050 and a rapidly rising obesity problem in many richer countries, the world faces a 21st century food crisis which combines the threats of starvation and ill health from over-eating at the same time.
FutureProofing examines possible responses to these twin problems: change in the way food is produced, and change in the way we think about food and its place in our lives, could significantly alter what we eat in the decades to come. Visiting Italy, the programme finds what solutions are on offer at the huge Expo 2015, as countries from across the world present their ideas for the future of food.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
FutureProofing is a series in which presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson examine the implications - social and cultural, economic and political - of the big ideas that are set to transform the way our society functions.
Episode 3: The Blockchain
Can computer technology and its systems for record-keeping, transparency and verification replace the role of trust in our society? The digital currency Bitcoin can be used to make peer to peer financial transactions without a central banking authority. The technology underlying this system is called the blockchain, and is enthusiastically advocated by libertarians. In this programme Timandra and Leo investigate whether its ramifications could go much further than currency and reach into disrupting the roles of government, from providing identity documents to tax collection. Or will governments, banks and other large powerful bodies meet the political and technical challenges of the blockchain by incorporating it into their own activities?
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
FutureProofing is a series in which presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson examine the implications - social and cultural, economic and political - of the big ideas that are set to transform the way our society functions.
Episode 2: Identity
Timandra and Leo explore how we will answer the question 'Who am I?' in future. New thinking points towards identity becoming increasingly a matter of choice rather than a fixed set of personal characteristics and social experiences. Instead of the geographical accidents which determine our places of birth and the environments in which we spend our formative years, future identities appear set to become more fluid, shaped by individual preference and an increasing range of options available to us - and not just culturally, but also regarding qualities such as our ethnicity and gender.
How might people express a more nuanced form of gender and sexuality in future? If you are born with one ethnicity, could you choose to identify as another? And if we are to shift identity often, could that remove the stigma traditionally attached to all those who present themselves as very different people at different stages of their lives?
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.
FutureProofing is a new series in which presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson examine the implications - social and cultural, economic and political - of the big ideas that are set to transform the way our society functions.
Episode 1: Life.
FutureProofing explores why emerging bio-technology will transform how we understand and control life itself.
Timandra and Leo discuss the consequences for humankind with leading genetic scientists and designers - people who are now able to create and manipulate the very building blocks of life.
The programme examines the results of inventing and editing life forms; how easy it is to become a bio-hacker; why the FBI has decided to adopt a strangely relaxed attitude towards such potentially catastrophic experimentation; and how a new understanding of biology as a software engineering system that we can design has profound consequences for the way we think about Life in future.
Producer: Jonathan Brunert.