Broadcast From Later
A podcast by the Toronto-based foresight studio, From Later — this is our experiment in recording the earliest phases of foresight and speculation. Futures thinking begins with identifying and unpacking Weak Signals of Change — things we notice that we don’t quite understand but we suspect may influence futures in significant ways.
On Broadcast From Later, we share our “Weakest Signals,” novel and weird events that appear faintly at the edges of our research radars. None of us know each other’s signals in advance, so it’s a candid view into the kinds of conversations we have when we frankly don’t know what we’re talking about.
We invite you to listen in on the researchers and strategists of From Later, as we try to wrap our minds around emerging changes and speculate on their potential significance.
Want to know our sources? Follow the Are.na channel where we post our signals. Learn more about From Later at www.fromlater.com
Broadcast From Later
Dance like an NPC w/ Radha Mistry & Tobias Revell
Arup foresight folks and FL family, Radha and Tobias join From Later strategists Rob and Valdis to chat auditory deep fakes, distributed power generation, and NPC mimicry.
/ Project Shasta
Adobe’s Project Shasta can isolate and extract elements from an audio recording— most notably, the human voice. Shasta then synthesizes its best version of that voice based on the audio data present in the recording. As AI becomes better at recreating our likenesses, how might our conceptions around identity change?
/ Breeze Punk
“What’s more punk than opting into inconvenience?” was the response Rob had to Tobias’ weak signal about a new small-scale wind turbine. Prototyped by Nanyang Technical University, this wind turbine can harvest energy at rates as low as 2m/sec, and could be a use case for distributed power generation. Let that cute future sink in and feel the breezepunk.
/ NPC Roleplay
Non-Player Character (NPC) is a video game term for people perceived as unable to act or think for themselves. The TikTok trend of humans acting IRL as NPCs in various situations has Radha wondering whether we're embodying these virtual behaviours as a way of bringing the digital world into the physical. Are we training our bodies to dance with robots?
Learn more about From Later at www.fromlater.com
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Interested in our sources? Check out From Later's Are.na page to explore the weak signals on our radars.