Welcome back. This week you're going to learn how to work with the basic building block of all future of thinking, the signal. Signals are futurists what words are to writers, or paint is to painters, or food is to chefs, or computer code is to programmers. Signals are the basic medium that features work in. Signals are what we build new things out of, and personally, I like to think of signals as a tool for helping us see in the dark. Let me show you what I mean. The late great British author Virginia Woolf once wrote, ''The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think,'' She didn't mean dark isn't depressing or full of terrible things, she meant dark as in unseeable, unknowable, and I agree. A dark unseeable future is a wonderful gift because if we can't see exactly what the future will be, then we can still change it, shape it, make it whatever we can imagine. But if we wanted to shape the future, we have to be able onto something, we can't just be blindly waving our hands in the dark. For futurists, the thing that we grab onto, that thing that we tried to shape and mold almost like a modeling clay, that is a signal. So let me give you an example of a signal, and then we'll look at some definitions. I was at a local park the other day and I saw this sign, NO DRONE ZONE. It was the first time I'd ever seen a sign like this. It caught my attention, It made me say, that's new, that's weird, and it made me wonder what's behind the sign, what's behind this rule. So I started to think about it. Is this a noise issue? Or maybe something about wanting to go to a park and look up and see blue skies and I started to imagine what the future might be like if this guy's were full of drones, constantly buzzing in the background and obscuring our view of the clouds. Then, I wondered well maybe it's a safety issue. There have been recent instances of attacks using drones. For example, the Venezuelan President was attacked during a public speech at a military parade by a drone. Then I started to wonder well, how are they going to enforce this rule because drones are long distance objects and recently when there was an airport in London that was closed because there was reporting of drones being cited that might interfere with the aircraft, nobody could figure out who was flying the drones are where do they come from. So how exactly are we going to enforce a rule like this, and ticket them, or penalize them. I also started to wonder what about police use of drones, because that's increasingly popular. Starting to see a lot of news stories about police putting cameras on drones and flying them to reported crime scenes, to take pictures before police can actually get there, and will NO DRONE ZONE be open to police drones, but not everybody else. What all of these Ideas and questions started to form into is the realization that we are entering into a really messy and unknown period. A world, where there are lots of drones and we're still figuring out what we want that world to look like. We're still figuring out privacy concerns, we're figuring out safety concerns, quality of life and mental health concerns, and that's what made this sign a signal to me about the future. It may be stopped and become aware of a change that's underway and it helped me think through what the realities of that change might be. Now that you have an example of a signal, let's talk definitions. The first definition of a signal comes from our Executive Director here at the institute Marina Gorbis. She says,'' A signal is a specific example of the future in the present.'' This points to a really important aspect of signals. They are real and concrete. They already exist, you can go look at them, you can experience them, you can talk to them. These are things that are already happening, they exist now, they are real. The second definition that we use a lot to talk about signals comes from the science fiction writer William Gibson, he famously said,'' The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.'' This points too another important aspect of signals. They're interesting because they point to a future where they might become more distributed, they might be more commonplace and widespread. What makes signals interesting is, they're just like the tip of the iceberg. As we start to imagine how the future might unfold and what the world might be like, signals are like a little tip of people experimenting with new things and they can help us imagine what would the world be like if they were evenly distributed. The last definition comes for me. I like to say that a signal is a clue that things might soon become different, and different, how? That's the really fun and fascinating part of signals. They make a stop and say ha or aha, because they're showing us some change, some shift, some disruption. That's my favorite aspect of signals to play with, to try to figure out what is the nature of change, what's such direction change, what's the cause for change, and by looking at that direction of change, we get a much clearer picture of where we're all going. Now, signals are often a new technology or a new scientific breakthrough, but they don't have to be. Signals can also be new business model, it could be a government project, it could be a change in demographics, it could even just be some weird behavior that people are doing that we've never seen them do before. Oftentimes, signals are new laws, or policies, or regulations, and we're going to in the next video look at all of these different types of signals. Then, we're going to talk about the really fun part, which is what do you do with this signal, once you catch one.
