The power to think ahead in a reckless age

In a forward-looking talk, author Bina Venkataraman answers a pivotal question of our time: How can we secure our future and do right by future generations? She parses the mistakes we make when imagining the future of our lives, businesses and communities, revealing how we can reclaim our innate foresight. What emerges is a surprising case for hope -- and a path to becoming the "good ancestors" we long to be.

So in the winter of 2012,

I went to visit my grandmother's house

in South India,

a place, by the way,

where the mosquitos have a special taste
for the blood of the American-born.

(Laughter)

No joke.

When I was there,
I got an unexpected gift.

It was this antique instrument

made more than a century ago,

hand-carved from a rare wood,

inlaid with pearls

and with dozens of metal strings.

It's a family heirloom,

a link between my past,

the country where my parents were born,

and the future,

the unknown places I'll take it.

I didn't actually realize it
at the time I got it,

but it would later become
a powerful metaphor for my work.

We all know the saying,

"There's no time like the present."

But nowadays, it can feel
like there's no time but the present.

What's immediate and ephemeral
seems to dominate our lives,

our economy and our politics.

It's so easy to get caught up
in the number of steps we took today

or the latest tweet
from a high-profile figure.

It's easy for businesses to get caught up
in making immediate profits

and neglect what's good
for future invention.

And it's far too easy
for governments to stand by

while fisheries and farmland are depleted

instead of conserved
to feed future generations.

I have a feeling that, at this rate,

it's going to be hard for our generation
to be remembered as good ancestors.

If you think about it,
our species evolved to think ahead,

to chart the stars,

dream of the afterlife,

sow seeds for later harvest.

Some scientists call this superpower
that we have "mental time travel,"

and it's responsible for pretty much
everything we call human civilization,

from farming to the Magna Carta

to the internet --

all first conjured in the minds of humans.

But let's get real:

if we look around us today,

we don't exactly seem to be
using this superpower quite enough,

and that begs the question: Why not?

What's wrong is how our communities,
businesses and institutions are designed.

They're designed in a way
that's impairing our foresight.

I want to talk to you
about the three key mistakes

that I think we're making.

The first mistake is what we measure.

When we look at the quarterly
profits of a company

or its near-term stock price,

that's often not a great measure

of whether that company
is going to grow its market share

or be inventive in the long run.

When we glue ourselves to the test scores
that kids bring back from school,

that's not necessarily
what's great for those kids' learning

and curiosity in the long run.

We're not measuring
what really matters in the future.

The second mistake we're making
that impairs our foresight

is what we reward.

When we celebrate a political leader
or a business leader

for the disaster she just cleaned up

or the announcement she just made,

we're not motivating that leader

to invest in preventing
those disasters in the first place,

or to put down payments on the future
by protecting communities from floods

or fighting inequality

or investing in research and education.

The third mistake
that impairs our foresight

is what we fail to imagine.

Now, when we do think about the future,

we tend to focus
on predicting exactly what's next,

whether we're using horoscopes
or algorithms to do that.

But we spend a lot less time imagining
all the possibilities the future holds.

When the Ebola outbreak
emerged in 2014 in West Africa,

public health officials around the world
had early warning signs

and predictive tools

that showed how
that outbreak might spread,

but they failed to fathom that it would,

and they failed to act
in time to intervene,

and the epidemic grew
to kill more than 11,000 people.

When people with lots of resources
and good forecasts

don't prepare for deadly hurricanes,

they're often failing to imagine
how dangerous they can be.

Now, none of these mistakes
that I've described,

as dismal as they might sound,

are inevitable.

In fact, they're all avoidable.

What we need to make
better decisions about the future

are tools that can aid our foresight,

tools that can help us think ahead.

Think of these as something
like the telescopes

that ship captains of yore used
when they scanned the horizon.

Only instead of for looking
across distance and the ocean,

these tools are for looking
across time to the future.

I want to share with you a
few of the tools

that I've found in my research

that I think can help us with foresight.

The first tool I want to share with you

I think of as making
the long game pay now.

This is Wes Jackson, a farmer
I spent some time with in Kansas.

And Jackson knows

that the way that most crops
are grown around the world today

is stripping the earth
of the fertile topsoil

we need to feed future generations.

He got together
with a group of scientists,

and they bred perennial grain crops
which have deep roots

that anchor the fertile topsoil of a farm,

preventing erosion
and protecting future harvests.

But they also knew

that in order to get farmers
to grow these crops in the short run,

they needed to boost
the annual yields of the crops

and find companies willing
to make cereal and beer using the grains

so that farmers could reap profits today
by doing what's good for tomorrow.

And this is a tried-and-true strategy.

In fact, it was used
by George Washington Carver

in the South of the United States
after the Civil War

in the early 20th century.

A lot of people have probably heard
of Carver's 300 uses for the peanut,

the products and recipes
that he came up with

that made the peanut so popular.

But not everyone knows
why Carver did that.

He was trying to help
poor Alabama sharecroppers

whose cotton yields were declining,

and he knew that planting
peanuts in their fields

would replenish those soils

so that their cotton yields
would be better a few years later.

But he also knew it needed
to be lucrative for them in the short run.

Alright, so let's talk
about another tool for foresight.

This one I like to think of
as keeping the memory of the past alive

to help us imagine the future.

So I went to Fukushima, Japan

on the sixth anniversary
of the nuclear reactor disaster there

that followed the Tohoku earthquake
and tsunami of 2011.

When I was there, I learned
about the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station,

which was even closer
to the epicenter of that earthquake

than the infamous Fukushima Daiichi
that we all know about.

In Onagawa, people in the city
actually fled to the nuclear power plant

as a place of refuge.

It was that safe.

It was spared by the tsunamis.

It was the foresight of just one engineer,

Yanosuke Hirai,

that made that happen.

In the 1960s, he fought
to build that power plant

farther back from the coast

at higher elevation
and with a higher sea wall.

He knew the story of his hometown shrine,

which had flooded
in the year 869 after a tsunami.

It was his knowledge of history
that allowed him to imagine

what others could not.

OK, one more tool of foresight.

This one I think of
as creating shared heirlooms.

These are lobster fishermen
on the Pacific coast of Mexico,

and they're the ones who taught me this.

They have protected
their lobster harvest there

for nearly a century,

and they've done that
by treating it as a shared resource

that they're passing on to their collected
children and grandchildren.

They carefully measure what they catch

so that they're not taking
the breeding lobster out of the ocean.

Across North America,
there are more than 30 fisheries

that are doing something
vaguely similar to this.

They're creating long-term stakes
in the fisheries known as catch shares

which get fishermen to be motivated

not just in taking whatever they can
from the ocean today

but in its long-term survival.

Now there are many,
many more tools of foresight

I would love to share with you,

and they come from all kinds of places:

investment firms that look
beyond near-term stock prices,

states that have freed their elections

from the immediate interests
of campaign financiers.

And we're going to need to marshal
as many of these tools as we can

if we want to rethink what we measure,

change what we reward

and be brave enough
to imagine what lies ahead.

Not all this is going to be easy,
as you can imagine.

Some of these tools
we can pick up in our own lives,

some we're going to need to do
in businesses or in communities,

and some we need to do as a society.

The future is worth this effort.

My own inspiration to keep up this effort
is the instrument I shared with you.

It's called a dilruba,

and it was custom-made
for my great-grandfather.

He was a well-known
music and art critic in India

in the early 20th century.

My great-grandfather had the foresight
to protect this instrument

at a time when my great-grandmother
was pawning off all their belongings,

but that's another story.

He protected it by giving it
to the next generation,

by giving it to my grandmother,

and she gave it to me.

When I first heard
the sound of this instrument,

it haunted me.

It felt like hearing a wanderer
in the Himalayan fog.

It felt like hearing
a voice from the past.

(Music)

(Music ends)

That's my friend Simran Singh
playing the dilruba.

When I play it, it sounds
like a cat's dying somewhere,

so you're welcome.

(Laughter)

This instrument is in my home today,

but it doesn't actually belong to me.

It's my role to shepherd it in time,

and that feels more meaningful to me
than just owning it for today.

This instrument positions me
as both a descendant and an ancestor.

It makes me feel part of a story
bigger than my own.

And this, I believe,

is the single most powerful way
we can reclaim foresight:

by seeing ourselves
as the good ancestors we long to be,

ancestors not just to our own children

but to all humanity.

Whatever your heirloom is,

however big or small,

protect it

and know that its music
can resonate for generations.

Thank you.

(Applause)