Where to go from here? I’ve noticed recently and interesting impulse many people have when I ask them about the future. They don’t tell me what they’d like it to look like. They try to guess what it will look like. And in so doing, they dampen their own expectations and hopes for what it could be, by trying to speculate correctly on what it will look like. I’m not sure why? Do we all have a desire to say we were right when we get there? Even if the ‘right’ answer isn’t where we really want to end up? My new desire is to push people to step out of what they think is the right answer, the best answer, the most realistic answer based on trends and existing tech and R & D investments and to get them to start thinking about what we would like investments to be focused on.

I wonder how much we could do in the arts, humanities and social sciences, to move communities forward and to think in new and exciting ways in the future if we were allotted the equivalent to other technological initiatives aiming to address the problem of energy transition, in the province of Alberta alone. Let’s take the number $150M. If you had that much, what would you have people do with it? How would you think? How would you mitigate risk so people might start trying to live differently, move differently, think differently, be different in relationship to everything in their world?

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