Speculative Futures: Unveiling Tomorrow with Ruthanna Emrys

Welcome to the Synthetic Minds Podcast, a platform where we transition from the vivid imaginations of science fiction to the tangible realities shaping our world. This podcast dives deep into the innovative visions presented by science fiction authors, unveiling how their speculative insights into future technologies and societal evolutions can enlighten us today and help organizations prepare for tomorrow. As your host, Dr. Mark Van Renam, accompanied by my digital twin, I invite you to explore with us the intricate dance between the natural and the artificial, to question what it means to be human in a world brimming with technological marvels. Our discussions aim to harness the power of future thinking, a crucial skill set in these rapidly changing times, drawing lessons from those who dare to dream about what lies ahead. In this episode of the Synthetic Minds Podcast, we explore the enthralling blend of Lovecraftian themes and pressing contemporary issues in technology and society. With Ruthanna Emrys, the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series and A Half Built Garden. We delve into Ruthanna's journey from exploring historical settings in her Innsmouth Legacy series to addressing near future scenarios in A Half Built Garden. The latter examines the potential responses and organizational structures necessary to tackle significant existential threats such as climate change, juxtaposed with the unforeseen challenge of alien contact. Throughout our conversation we touch on the psychology of emerging technologies, scenario planning for various futures, and the critical importance of ethical considerations in technology development. Ruthanna emphasizes the non inevitability of specific technological paths and the value of speculative fiction in broadening our perspective on potential futures, urging us to consider a range of scenarios and their underlying assumptions. This episode offers listeners a deep dive into the interplay between speculative fiction and futures thinking, encouraging us to question our assumptions, embrace complexity, and actively participate in shaping a desirable future. Don't forget to like and subscribe to be informed when future episodes become available. Join us on this enlightening journey where we seek to understand the future by examining the thought provoking narratives and insights provided by Ruthanna Emerson.

Well Ruthanna, thank you for coming to my show.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Perfect. So before we dive into sort of the detailed questions about how science fiction can help organizations, can you share a bit about your background and the one or two books that you're most proud of?

Sure. So I am a science fiction and fantasy writer. I have PhD in cognitive psychology and big interest in emerging technologies and the psychology of emerging technologies. I've written the Innsmouth Legacy series which is a couple of books set in historical 1949. Playing around with H.P. lovecraft stories and mostly making his monsters into the good guys and using that to get at some of the social weirdness of those times. And then more recently, I wrote A Half Built Garden, which is a near future science fiction about what it takes to deal with the big existential problems we face now, like climate change, and then how the systems and organizations that are set up to deal with those problems have trouble when they bump into different sorts of problems, which this being me, is the problem of aliens showing up.

Okay, well, I think that that sounds really interesting. Let's dive into that a bit more. So you mentioned you have a common interest on the psychology of emerging technologies, which I think is quite fascinating to, to learn a bit more about, especially because emerging technologies and, you know, let's say AI or you know, anything that becomes more intelligent than humans, whether that's aliens in the case of your books or just general technology. Can you share a bit more about your thoughts on the psychology of emerging technology and how you look into it?

So the place where my psychology background and my interest in science fiction really overlap in this is that I'm fascinated by the way that people think about technology in terms of stories about what it's going to look like. And as a futurist, I'm sure that you have seen the thing where a certain technology and a certain way of that technology playing out gets canonical in foresight circles for a while and that often is not necessarily a close match to the real and immediate or even real and upcoming problems that are happening with that. So the place where this first jumped out at me was that I got to join. Oh, this would have been the mid aughts in some of the conversations taking place at that time around nanotechnology. And you would go into these rooms full of smart people, people trained people who were very familiar with technology. Everyone wanted to talk about tiny nanobots that would make you immortal and the ethics of that. Nobody wanted to talk about the health risks of putting nanoparticles in sunscreen, which was the thing that was happening at the time. And no one really wanted to talk about. What if it turns out that we can't easily make tiny nanobots that will make you immortal either? And there was just this disconnect that I found fascinating the more so because no one ever wanted to ask. So the prototypical science fictional question is, what if this goes on? And one that I often find interesting is what if this doesn't go on? What if this is not a linear growth or predictable pattern? One of the things that we Expect to be easy turn out to be hard. And the things we expect to be hard turn out to be, which generally is the case.

Like that.

Yes. And now I'm seeing similar things with AI and things that get called AI but look very little like what AI looks like in science fiction. But everyone would really much rather talk about the, you know, the emergence AI gods or demons, then talk about how is this going to, if it doesn't break through into actual sapience, what will it look like, how will it affect our lives? What if this doesn't go on in the direction we expected it to go on? So I guess the non inevitability of specific technological paths is really interesting.

I think that's really interesting that you mentioned this because what I see currently happening there's this very optimistic techno optimist perspective where AI or technology will solve all our problems. So we don't really have to worry about the long term problems that we're facing, such as climate change, because eventually AI will resolve those issues. And on the other hand, we have the very dystopic, very dystopian perspective where, you know, I will, you know, we'll have robots roaming the street like the Terminator and it will kill us all. But there's very little balanced perspective. And I think that will be very beneficial for society and organizations.

Yeah, and I don't even know if it's balanced as, I mean balance is definitely a part of it. But so is, are there different futures that are possible from this point? And people who are working in technology often feel, feel very awkward about the fact that possibility could in fact develop in different directions and there are choices to make about that and there are ethical quandaries and there are non inevitabilities.

So what do you recommend for organizations, if they want to think about more long term, to sort of include those different scenarios, to include future thinking, which means, you know, we have to look at a wide variety of scenarios to understand what is happening. What are sort of your recommendations here?

So one of the typical things that happens in sort of a first round foresight discussion is you come up with the optimistic scenario and the pessimistic scenario and the maybe not much will change scenario. And I think people really need to go beyond that, not just in thinking of more scenarios, but in thinking about, okay, we've put out this pessimistic scenario. What makes that stuff more likely, what makes it less likely, what are the actual probabilities and the things that feed into it? And then for the optimistic scenario, is there Anything we can do that makes this more likely? Are there blockers? Could we add in a weird scenario? What if none of our assumptions are right? Can we lay out those assumptions and do the crystal ball thing that doctors do when they're diagnosing of what if I'm wrong about this? Why would I be wrong about.

So you basically recommend just to do almost scenario planning for each scenario so you can have a better understanding of what's going on. For the pessimistic, the weird scenario, which I like, I really like to have a completely off chart, off the chart scenario because I think that will also help your, your creativity to come up with things that you would normally never do. And I think that's especially something that I can imagine that you as a science fiction writer does. You're very good at because that's what science fiction writing is all about. Envision the out of this world, sometimes literally scenarios of what can be.

Yeah, I think it might be useful to think of it as a map rather than a prediction. So when you're trying to figure out, say I'm in dc, so I might be trying to figure out how to get to New York and what I'm absolutely not going to do is lay out the most optimistic scenario for getting to New York and the least optimistic scenario for getting to New York and then start driving. I am going to be looking at, you know, what kind of traffic would make it a bad idea to go up 95 and is this a major holiday? And I'm, I'm looking at the, the, the multidimensionality of how to get from point A to point B. And I'm not just depicting point B and then heading in a direction under the assumption that point B is there. I'm using that as a description of what is the space in which I need to draw out these maps.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so for your, for your book Half Half Built Garden, how, how did you use this, this approach to sort of lay science?

So I wouldn't say I used quite that approach because writing science fiction really isn't actually the same thing as foresight, which is an area that I have at least a little bit of experience with. I've, I've done some of that sort of in the D.C. area. But when you are, when you're writing a book or when you're writing science fiction, you can do anything from say, okay, here is point B and I don't care how we get there to here is point A. And what comes next from point A. Or you can pick point Q and go off and do something with that. But I was actually doing something more foresightish with a Half Built garden than I would usually do because I was really interested in the question of what would it take to actually solve these problems. What sort of, more specifically, what sort of organization would be well geared to solve these problems? Because right now we're trying to solve them with organizations with governance structures, with strategies that were developed for other problems for which they were pretty decent, but they were not really set up for this sort of large scale cross border, just the complexity of what get called wicked problems. And so I wanted to think about, okay, what does an organization look like that can do that? And then what gives that organization trouble?

I like the reference to wicked problems because I think wicked problems are obviously they are very complex problems with a lot of different stakeholders and there's no one solution to solve this wicked problem. But we often don't think about, and we often don't think in terms of wicked problems. We think in terms of I am a large organization and I need to satisfy my shareholders for the next quarterly shareholder meeting. How am I going to do that? Well, I think wicked problems, they require much longer term perspective where you take into consideration all the different stakeholders. What would be your recommendation for organizations how to, how to embrace wicked problems and embrace this type of, type of approach to the long term future?

I think bluntly we need to think beyond shareholders. We need to think, we need to internalize externalities. We need systems and decision making processes that take seriously the full web of connections that organizations exists in and that prioritize some level of long term stability and sustainability, both in the traditional environmental sense, but in the sense of what does it take besides getting through the next quarter for this organization to get through the next century? And that can be a hard thing to find the time for. But I think that it's really necessary or the answer is going to be as in many places it was in the Half Built Garden that none of them are.

Go back to your book you mentioned at the start with Lovecraftian themes and then now you move more to near term emerging technologies like Half Built Garden. How did you make the transition and why did you make that transition?

I don't think of myself as someone who is a fantasy writer transitioning to science fiction or vice versa. I think of myself as a speculative fiction writer and I'm writing about the problems that are interesting me and frustrating me at the moment. At the same time, the, the two, the series and Then the science fiction novel, they felt like they had a surprising amount in common. I've sort of figured out that when I'm writing, I. I tend to hook onto this odd combination of things that makes a book feel alive and ready to go. And those things seem to be large bodies of water and found family and how things change over time and snarky aliens. And those things all show up in all of those books. And it was very interesting to me, writing a future after I was writing the past. And I deliberately put a half foot garden about the same period in the future as innsmouth Legacy was in the past, in part because I felt like after spending two books writing in 1949, I had a sense of how much changes over that period of time. And I wanted to play with that because there are things that are still very recognizable from 1949 and things that people in 1949 would have taken absolutely for granted that are just wild to us now. So, you know, a relatively modern example this is that when I was doing my historical research and I wrote this book that takes place at fictional Ivy League university and people are doing library research that I called up a friend who used to work in the library at Harvard, and I was like, okay, I know that people used to smoke more. They used to smoke everywhere. They didn't smoke in the library, right? And she said, yeah, they did. They spoke in the library. They smoked in the rare book room. There were professors who had tenure and you could not get them to stop smoking in the library up through the 1980s. And, you know, I mentioned, this is wild to me, who was born in a time when people smoked in restaurants. And I mentioned this to my kids and it just makes no sense to them. So what's it going to be like in 2083? What are the things that we're going to consider to be absolutely inconceivable that we take for granted in 2024 and thinking about those changes. But then what are also the things that we take for granted now that we may not have gotten over, taken for granted then?

So what are some of, some of your thoughts on how our society will evolve in the coming decades? You know, you mentioned, you know, how the garden. You, you use aliens as sort of a metaphor for your AI and.

Oh, no, no, no. I use aliens as a metaphor for climate change. It's, it's, it's. I wouldn't say I'm. They're not really a metaphor like they're real aliens there, but they. The question I was interested in was really about big, huge new problems. And I know people want to think that AI is the biggest huge new problem, but it's a technology. It's a technology among several technologies and it may be one of the things that change our lives dramatically over the coming decades, but it may not be in the ways that we expect. So I was really just looking for what is the new wicked problem and what is the one that I will be willing to spend a whole book writing about?

Going back to what we just talked about. What are the things that we take for granted now that 20 years from now we look back? Like how, how is it possible? How is society going to evolve in your perspective?

Oh, I think that we will think of fossil fuels in a lot of the way that we think now about smoking. I think that we will, there will be types of automation that we take very much for granted and can't imagine having lived without. I think that we are either going to get over the sort of isolation and social granularity of modern life or we are going to be in whole different sorts of trouble with it. So I think we're going to either have new methods of community building and connection making or we're going to need them even more urgently.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I agree with that. I think the community building that we have at the moment, social media, I think on a global level, seems to me a bit broken.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if people think of social media like they do about smoking too.

Yeah, yeah. The way we created these addiction machines for our children and for adults where we just, you know, attach to our screens, I guess that, you know, social media is kind of an addiction like smoking. So I wouldn't be surprised if that sort of will turn out to be true.

One of the things I found when I was trying to create a future for a half built garden is this was meant to be, this is the most positive place that I can imagine us actually getting to from here. It's not a utopia, but it is. I can map from point A to point B and this is the best that I can get. And I tried, I really tried and I could not get a positive future that had the Internet as we know it. And I was very upset with this because I love the Internet. I do. And I think it's wonderful and it's also terrible. And maybe someone else will think about how to have the type of Internet we have now and a good life, but I couldn't figure it out.

So how do you foresee the Internet 20 years from now, what role do you think it will play?

I don't foresee, because I think this is one of those places where it's very much, what choices are we going to make in terms of what can I come up with that's positive? A lot of it was what I later discovered to be more mastodon, like something a little more broken down into manageable communities, something with a little more of pro social reputation tracking, something to slow down the spread of mis and disinformation so rapidly around the world. I can think of a number of different ways to do that. I ended up doing it by building on the current technologies of crowdsourcing and citizen science, which I like, as ways of building networks around sharing and processing information, which seemed like a useful thing to do in a complex world.

In the first episode, I interviewed Carl Schroeder. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. So he wrote the book Stealing Worlds, and in the book blockchain plays a really, really important role. Do you see blockchain to become more important in the coming.

Carl and I have had so many arguments about blockchain, and several times I have sat down with him and I've said, okay, convince me. Convince me that this is a worthwhile technology that is actually useful. And he's tried and he has yet to convince me of that. And the last time I spoke to him, I got the impression that maybe he was leaning a little bit the other way now. So I think blockchain is a dead end. Maybe I'm being particularly intransigent about this and someone will figure out a way to do it that doesn't use the level of power requirements of a small country and facilitate black market sales without actually making regular ones easier. And that has a better way of fixing errors than schisming and then letting some people go along with the error. But no, I do not think that. I don't think it should be important in the coming decade.

Okay, well, that's a fascinating approach to that. And I think it also sort of shows you that in this world we live in fast changing times and new technologies are coming up and popping up every time. What do you think organizations should do to navigate this rapidly changing world where we have new technologies almost being announced on a daily basis, especially with AI at the moment. Future thinking is crucial for science fiction writers. How can organizations adopt a similar mindset? You mentioned that the mapping out earlier. Can we dive a little bit?

Yeah, I think the mapping out is important. I think a lot of Organizations want to jump on the bandwagon of what's hot and what the current buzzwords are. And without saying that people should avoid the current buzzwords, I think that we need to remember that these are decisions that we make and ways that we are actively shaping those technologies. And so while looking at the new technologies and saying, okay, how can we use this? Can we use this? Is it the right thing for our use cases? And not letting yourself slide behind on technology, but also not just assuming that you need to be handling it the same way that everyone else is and then thinking, thinking mindfully about the options and really laying out those options and treating decisions as decisions.

How can we sort of have these ethical discussions on technology? Because obviously technology has a very long term approach. This decision that we make about AI today will have a big impact 5, 10 years down the line. How can we have these ethical discussions and how do you think of them?

I think it's a harder thing to do in organizations. And shaping organizational culture is a thing that people talk about and it's really hard. But you really do need to shape an organizational culture where someone can speak up and say, I don't think we should do this and here's why. And get listened to, not always get followed, but get listened to and not get dinged for bringing up that point of view. For a science fiction writer, it's easier. I don't have to argue with anyone except for myself. And arguing with myself is where I get books out of. I am always writing a book around a question that I don't have in my head a clear answer to. So for a Half Built Garden it was, you know, about the, the maintenance and change of governance structures and what it takes for them to change in response to new problems without losing what makes them valuable. For Innsmouth Legacy, it was about community building and rebuilding and about really long term sustainability. If you're thinking about things on a, beyond the scale of a single species level, how does that change the perspective that you bring to things? And it was also me arguing with myself about the value of imagining things that are too strange too be comfortable or maybe compatible with human psychology. Yeah.

Can you give me an example of what's something that's really, really strange that you, you know, that you discuss?

So Lovecraft, the fundamental, one of the fundamental ideas in Lovecraft's mythos is that we live in this tiny little speck of reality that seems sane to us and everything outside of that is both most of what's out there and absolutely destructive to Human life, insanity. And this I don't believe. But then there's, you know, okay, so what if there are things that are. Can hurt us without even noticing that we're there? Or what if there are things that feel like that but we don't actually know if they are? You know, how do you talk to something that just feels wrong and get over that barrier to communication?

Yeah. And often science fiction stories sort of a present or service, a critique to social societal issues. And we briefly discuss the addiction of social media. That's something that we look back on 20 years from now as something that is like smoking. How do you think that speculative fiction serves as a mirror or as a critique of our current social challenges, especially in terms of technology's role? And should organizations be commercial organizations as well as governments more incorporate science fiction within their strategy making?

I think it's definitely a good idea. I think you have to be careful about it because it's very easy to say, okay, we talked to a science fiction writer or two. Who did you talk to? Oh, yes, they're the, a couple of science fiction writers who make a living as consultants doing this sort of thing. Okay, but that's the same two people everyone else talked about and then you heard their ideas. Now what are you doing with their ideas? Are you incorporating science fictional ways of thinking? Are you trying to argue with these or build from them? Are you asking questions of science fiction authors that they haven't gotten before? Are you asking your own people to try some science fiction? You see that sometimes Microsoft put out anthology a little while ago of foresight fiction built around the type of technology that they work on. So you think you have to go beyond, okay, I'm incorporating science fiction to how am I incorporating science fiction into decision? The same way as incorporating any other technology and science fictional imagination really is. It's a psychological technology. It's a particular way or a set of ways of thinking about the world, thinking about the future, thinking about the present.

In my, in my fourth book that I wrote, which was about the Metaverse, called Step into the Metaverse, I included a science fiction story at the start of the book, especially because, you know, this was a couple of years ago. The Metaverse, you know, is sort of this abstract type of thinking of we don't really know what like a 3D Internet looks like, what a spatial Internet looks like. And I thought, I included that because I thought it was useful to tell a story about how these very abstract technologies actually can play out in the next decade. Do you think that this kind of story writing should be done more often by organizations, with or without the help of Sasha.

I think it should, but then it should be used as a tool. So science fiction prototyping, for example, is a way of using writing stories about a technology to think about how that technology will actually get used and what some of the problems are, what people would want out of it. But it can be very easy to write a story that just supports your own assumptions about how a technology is going to play out. And, you know, what am I assuming? What if I'm wrong? I think is really a very important tool. There I was so back in the lead up to the 2016 election. At one point, I was lucky enough to be in a room with, with a bunch of people from a foresight group with very good reputation. And they were sitting around, they were talking about the election, and like every single other foresight and forecasting group, they believed that Hillary Clinton was going to win. But they said, okay, if we're wrong about this, why would we be wrong about it? And they had one of the most interesting foresight conversations I've ever heard, and they were 100% right about why they were wrong about their prediction. And that really made me think about the importance of that questioning and of not just saying what's most likely, because the most likely thing, by definition, will not always happen. But what are. What are the other possibilities? What are the less likely but possible things? And why would those happen? And how would be. Might we be able to see if those things were happening? Is there anything we can do about that?

Yeah. Do you think AI can play a role in that process? Research has shown that ChatGPT is quite good at research brainstorming, at coming with ideas. Do you think that AI could be of use here?

I've seen AI get used to do things like take crowdsourced ideas and synthesize them together and come up with a summary of everyone's point of view that more people agree with than they do with any of the individual things. And that, I think, is an area of potential. I think where we have to be careful with current AI is that it's quite good at coming up with averages and aggregations. If what you want to do is come up with something that's off to the left of whatever all the humans have come up with, you're probably better off asking a human who hasn't been in the room and doesn't know what the thing they're supposed to be agreeing with is. But I think there's A lot of potential with AI for, for summarization, for aggregation. And so much of it really comes down to the choices about what you feed in as the learning data set. And I think there's a lot of potential for us to do more things with deliberately trying to shape those data sets. And one thing in particular that I haven't seen a lot of and just keep mentioning because I really hope someone does it, is that we hear a lot about say using machine learning to take the data set of all of the hiring decisions we've made and now you put the AI in place and oh no, the AI is biased against female applicants. Nevermind, we won't use that thing. You could use the AI to find out what biases are in your data set. If you care about getting the best people and you don't want those biases in there, then the AI will exaggerate those subtle patterns and will tell you what it is that you need to counter in order to actually be making hiring decisions based on how good people are. And that is something that I haven't seen anyone do. I would love to see people doing it. And one of the things I did in a half built garden was start to think about, okay, coming out the other side of this, could you program algorithms to help you be biased in the directions that you want to be biased? You know, if you want to make decisions that are more influenced by say environmental justice, what would you put into that data set in order to have an AI that will produce output put that pushes you towards that type of decision that you want to make but haven't been making naturally.

Yeah, but that's also, there's also a risk to that as we saw with Google Gemini a couple of weeks ago when they, you know, their image generator tool created images from let's say the founding fathers that were female or black, which wasn't, you know, really that's the way the world works.

Well, you have to use an appropriately tailored data set for the actual use case. Like that's one of the things that we don't do right now because it's so expensive and requires such a big amount of data. But hopefully those are things that we're going to be addressing and then we'll be able to do more and more of, okay, we're tailoring this towards creating accurate images. We're tailoring this towards creating diverse images.

There's, yeah, well there's obviously still, still, still worked to do there. So. But do you think that AI will be, you know, predominantly a positive or a negative force for society?

I think that's a decision, that's a set of decisions that we need to make.

Do you think we, as humans, we are able to make the right decision so that it will be a force for good, for society?

Yeah, I think we're able. Are we gonna. That's a whole different question. But humans are capable of making good decisions. We have been known to do it occasionally in the past and I firmly believe that we can do it again. But we need to actually, you know, make those choices and think about what we want, the outcomes.

And given your explorations, which wicked problems should organizations pay attention to today and to ensure that we end up in sort of on the right side of history?

I mean, I think everyone knows what they are, you know, climate change and income inequality and fascism and social justice. This is not a place where we have trouble identifying what the big problems are. The question is whether we're willing to do the hard work of legitimizing them as priorities.

And looking beyond your current books, what are some of the new themes and or technologies that you're exploring in your next work?

I am actually the current problem that is bugging me is what if I never gets intelligent but does get better at all the things it's actually good at now, like making persuasively fluid text. And the thing that really jumped out at me at the beginning of last year was, you know, it had in science fiction, always, always the, the AI that claims it's a person is actually a person. And it is always the case that you are right to say the thing that acts and sounds like a person is a person. And all of a sudden I was like, what if Data wasn't really a person? What if he was just a very well trained large language model? And then the question beyond that is if we now have to more and more take things that look and act like people and remind ourselves they're not people, how does that affect how we treat other actual people? It gets more and more challenging to say, okay, if something can do X, it's a person. And yet we know, we absolutely know that current large language models do not have the underlying structure. There is no plausible explanation by which they are actually sapient entities. And you know, I saying that from a psychological perspective and under a scientific perspective that they just, they don't have that level of support for understanding the world, but they do have the ability to sound like it under the right circumstances. And if you ask the right things and it's a lot subtler of a distinction to make than talking to Eliza and saying, I have to go now. And being asked, how long have you been going? Which is how I broke Eliza when I was a kid at the Boston computer.

Oh, nice. But I think we tend to anthropomorphize AI. You know, I make the same mistake as well. You know, you talk about he or she quite quickly. Well, I think it should be an it. You know, I think we should make that distinction really, really clear that these are machines and they are not conscious beings. Because the moment we start to anthropomorphize, I think we'll have fallen to the trap that you just discussed.

At the same time, anthropomorphizing is absolutely one of the things humans consistently do. You cannot stop them from anthropomorphizing things that are a lot less human sounding than a large language model where people anthropomorphize bugs, they anthropomorphize computers, they anthropomorphize cars, they anthropomorphize swords, they anthropomorphize the dishwasher when it's not working. I've got a housemate who constantly gets into arguments with the refrigerator. And if we have a solution to this, it is not the solution of humans. Don't antiform work by.

Yeah, fair enough. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Ruthanna. So do you have any final recommendation for organizations how they can better prepare for the future?

Trying to think if I have anything other than the rants that you've already got out of me, other than the standard quote about the best way to predict the future is to create it. I think that it's not that simple and it's not that that much agency in any one organization, but the best way to think about the future is to think about how much of a role you have to play in making it.

Well, I think that's a fantastic ending for this very insightful podcast. Thank you very much for joining me on the show, Rustana.

Thank you.

And that concludes today's episode of the Synthetic Minds podcast. In our enlightening conversation, we ventured through the speculative and often eerie landscape sculpted by Ruthanna Emrys. Exploring the intricate interplay between Lovecraftian lore, emerging technologies, and the fabric of society. We navigated Ruthanna's thought provoking insights on the psychology of emerging technologies, discussing the narratives that shape our perceptions and expectations of technological advancement. Ruthanna emphasized the importance of considering a multitude of futures, challenging us to ponder not just the optimistic and pessimistic trajectories but also the strange and unexpected paths that lie before us. In her works such as A Half Built Garden, Ruthanna crafts narratives that prompt us to examine the wicked problems of our era, climate change, social inequality, and more, urging us to adopt a multidimensional approach to future thinking. Her stories serve as a mirror reflecting our current societies and ethical dilemmas while encouraging organizations to embrace speculative fiction as a tool for strategic foresight. As we concluded our journey, Ruthanna left us with a powerful the future is not a predetermined destination, but a landscape shaped by our choices and actions. By engaging with speculative fiction, we can expand our horizons, challenge our assumptions, and actively participate in shaping the future we wish to inhabit. Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe to Continue Explaining, exploring the boundless possibilities that lie at the intersection of science fiction and reality, and join us next time on Synthetic Mind.