New Week #70
A new survey asks: will humanity survive the next 1,000 years? Salesforce says the future of work is nature retreats and meditation. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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To begin
This week, Salesforce are building a new workplace utopia in rural California.
Meanwhile, a survey reveals what the pandemic has done to our expectations for the long-term survival of humanity.
And yet another startup wants to launch tens of thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit.
Let’s go!
🌱 Force field
This week, a glimpse into our emerging hybrid work future.
Tech giant Salesforce announced that it will open a new wellness centre for employees. Ever wondered what utopia looks like according to the world’s leading Customer Relationship Management software firm?
The Trailblazer Ranch spans 75 acres in California’s Scotts Valley. It will be a space where Salesforce staff can come together to engage in ‘guided nature walks, restorative yoga… art journaling, and meditation.’ All while taking time out, presumably, to talk about the future of CRM.
This time last year, Salesforce made headlines when it leaned hard and early into the new work normal, proclaiming ‘the 9 to 5 workday is dead’ and announcing that staff would never return to the office full time. The company employs around 50,000 worldwide; that includes 9,000 in San Francisco, making it Silicon Valley’s largest employer.
⚡ NWSH Take: It’s not often that NWSH takes on the heady world of CRM. So why is this interesting? // Salesforce is famous for the near-religious intensity of its internal culture, which deploys a charismatic CEO, A-list celebrities, and a massive annual gathering called Dreamforce to sell the mission to staff. Now, it faces a challenge: how do you do internal culture when people never come to the office? The Trailblazer Ranch is intended to form a part of the answer; the company say it will roll out similar destinations to staff worldwide. // In the 2020s, then, big corporations will quest after new ways to insinuate themselves into the lives of staff; look at Google’s plans to build a new megacampus in San Jose, which will include accommodation for thousands of Googlers: it amounts to a reboot of the 19th-century, pre-automobile company town. // Many knowledge workers will have to decide just how close they want their employer to get. Visit the company meditation retreat? Live in a company apartment? Meanwhile, don’t forget the wildcard answer taking shape amid all this. Meta and others want to prove that the future of internal culture isn’t retreats or corporate towns, but virtual worlds.
⏰ Great Scott!
If you’re a child of the 1980s, this week has already delivered one ‘I can’t believe that was almost 40 years ago’ moment.
But how about this for a follow-up?
The DeLorean, made famous by 1985’s Back to the Future, is back: this time as an EV.
The original version was made only between 1981 and ‘82; it wasn’t a hit, and the company behind it went bust soon after manufacture ended. For a whole generation, though, the DeLorean’s iconic gull-wings spell car of the future.
The new Delorean Motor Company is no relation to the old one; it’s the creation of British entrepreneur Stephen Wynne, who acquired the rights to the brand in the 1990s. Wynne has made a few previous, and unsuccessful, attempts to reboot the car. But never as an EV.
At the heart of this attempt? A cunning ploy to mash together two powerful trends. First, the way the internet amplifies nostalgia for the artefacts of mass culture. Second, the quest for a new, more sustainable forms of (luxury) consumerism. It will still need roads. But it might just work.
🌊 Hang in there
In the wake of the pandemic, how do we feel about the long-term prospects for humanity? A new survey published this week offers a glimpse.
In January, polling company YouGov asked Britons a series of questions on human extinction, including (i) How many years do you think it will take for humans to die out, if we ever do? and (ii) What, if anything, is the most likely cause of human extinction?
The company last asked these questions of British citizens in 2016. Since then, the proportion who believe humans will go extinct within the next 1,000 years has risen only slightly, from 21% to 25%.
The biggest surprise? The proportion who believe a pandemic is among the three most likely causes of the End Times has also risen only slightly, from 27% to 30%
But the proportion who believe climate change is a likely cause of our demise has jumped from 31% to 42%. That’s by far the biggest shift in opinion surfaced by the YouGov poll. And we should pay attention to it.
⚡ NWSH Take: Plenty of other evidence points in the same direction: fear of climate collapse, and our descent into a permanently degraded afterworld, has rocketed across the last decade. That fear, and the psychic tension it is fuelling, now hangs over our collective lives like an undetonated grenade. At some point, it will surely explode. What will this explosion look like? // One answer? Take a look at the rising numbers who are joining organisations such as Deep Adaptation: a movement based on the belief that The Collapse is Now Inevitable. Critics say Deep Adaptation pedals a form of climate surrender based on flawed science; leaders of the movement say that catastrophic warming can’t be stopped, and that we should concentrate on supporting one another and processing our grief. // Right now these movements are fringe. But they’re growing, and the new YouGov results suggest that is set to continue. In the 2020s, existential risk is set to become a mainstream political issue — and it will fuel mainstream socio-political movements.
🛰 I need some space
A British entrepreneur plans to launch up to 300,000 satellites with the help of the Rwandan government.
Greg Wyler founded UK-based satellite internet company OneWeb, which went bankrupt in March 2020. His new company, E-Space, says it plans to launch ‘a vast mesh’ of small satellites into low Earth orbit; they will provide a range of telecoms services to private and public clients.
To launch satellites, you need licenses. E-Space says it has acquired them via the government of Rwanda, which was an investor in OneWeb.
⚡ NWSH Take: Anyone who writes a weekly newsletter must cultivate a set of obsessions. It turns out that one of mine is our view of the night sky. // As regular readers know, I’m already exercised over Elon Musk and Starlink’s plan to launch 40,000 satellites. Now we’re talking another 300,000. // Astronomers say Starlink satellites are already damaging their view of the cosmos. If we allow another 300K satellites to go up, will astronomy as we know it even be possible? E-Space claim their satellites will help clear up space debris, but most experts seem to regard that claim as suspect at best. // We urgently need a 2022 Global Conference on Humanity’s View of the Night Sky. If you want to help me organise, just drop me a line.
🗓️ Also this week
😇 A new study suggests that AI-generated human faces appear more trustworthy than real faces. Researchers at the University of Lancaster asked study participants to rate real faces and those created by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for trustworthiness. The GAN faces won. That may be because they are closer to average faces, which are consistently rated as more trustworthy.
👨💻 Workers in Belgium will soon have the right to ask for a four-day work week without any change in pay. Under a new package of economic reforms, workers can earn a three-day weekend by squeezing their existing full time hours into four days.
🍔 McDonald’s is planning to open restaurants in the metaverse. The company just filed a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a ‘virtual restaurant featuring home delivery’.
🌌 UK scientists have created the world’s largest and most detailed simulation of the universe. Researchers at Durham University used the DiRAC-3 supercomputer to create a virtual universe 600 million lightyears across. Last week, I wrote about the coming rise of simulations in our day-to-day lives.
🏰 Disney wants to build towns for fans who love the brand so much they never want to leave. The first Storyliving by Disney community will consist of 1,900 housing units, and is planned for California’s Coachella Valley.
📺 YouTube say they will allow creators to sell their videos as NFTs on the platform. The move comes as part of a new suite of creator tools. In June 2021 an NFT of the iconic ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ video sold for over $760,000.
💥 Alphabet’s AI division, DeepMind, has trained an AI that can control a nuclear fusion reactor. The team behind this work say the AI may help scientists develop new approaches to fusion reactor control.
🐟 Scientists have created a fake fish made out of human heart stem cells, which can propel itself on its own. The Harvard scientists behind the work say their results may take us one step closer to being able to grow new, functional human hearts in the lab.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,927,677,692
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8032172906
💉 Global population vaccinated: 54.2%
🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 13% complete
📖 On this day: On 17 February 1867 the first ship passes through the Suez Canal.
Take Me Back to the Start
Thanks for reading this week.
We’re edging closer to controlled nuclear fusion. We’re harnessing stem cells and learning how to grow new human organs. Even the DeLorean is making a comeback.
Is this the Great Acceleration – a new age of innovation in the realm of atoms rather than bits – that some have been promising?
NWSH will keep watching, and keep asking what it all means for our shared future. And there’s one thing you can do to further that mission: share!
If you found this week’s instalment valuable, why not forward this email to a friend, family member, or colleague? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why they should read. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.
I’ll be back next week as usual. Be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.
Great insights, David. I am glad I have found the NWSH. I am a futurist and enthusiat working with future literacy.