About this conversation
Can a better future be engineered, or can it only be grown from where we are?
In this conversation, complexity scientist Dave Snowden explains why designing an ideal future and working backwards does not work in complex systems. Instead, he describes how change grows from small, safe-to-fail experiments that start from the present.
Dave shares his work with distributed ethnography, where teenagers collect stories from their own communities, and local experiments in Wales that use these stories to guide action. He explains why he finds stage models of human development problematic, and compares human and AI approaches to making sense of complexity.
A bracing conversation that offers hope without optimism: not the belief that things will turn out well, but the commitment to act well anyway.
