通过未来实验与想象塑造可持续未来的探索

精选100篇经典TED演讲，时长8-15分钟，内容涵盖创新、成长与未来趋势。提供MP3在线播放、下载及英文文本，助你提升听力与口语。用思想的力量，点燃学习热情！下面是本期【TED】100篇经典演讲口语听力素材合集的内容，坚持积累，让你的英语更贴近生活！

I was it the future for a living. Not just one future, but many possible futures, bringing back evidences from those futures for you to experience today. Like an archaeologist of the future. Over the years, my many journeys have brought back things like a new species of synthetically engineered bees. A book named Pets says protein. A machine that makes you rich by trading your genetic data, a lamp powered by sugar, a computer for growing food. Okay. So I don't actually travel to different futures yet. But my husband, John and I spend a lot of time thinking and creating visions of different futures in our studio. We are constantly looking out for weak signals, those murmurs of future potential. Then we trace those threads of potential out into the future asking, what might it feel like to live in this future? What might we see here and even breathe? Then we are an experiment, build prototypes, make objects, bringing aspects of these futures to life, making them concrete and tangible so you can really feel the impact of those future possibilities here and now. But this work is not about predictions. It's about creating tools. Tools that can help connect our present and our future selves. So we become active participants in creating a future we want, a future that works for all.

So how do we go about doing this? For a recent project called drone Avery, we were interested in exploring what it would mean to live with drones and ascites. Drones that have the power to see things we can't, to go places we can't and to do so with increasing autonomy. But you understand the technology getting our hands dirty with scrucion. So we built several different drones in our studio, we gave them names, functions and then flew them. But not without difficulty. These came loose, GPS signals glitched and drones crashed. But it was through such experimentation that we could construct a very concrete and very experiential slice of one possible future. So now let's go to that future. Let's imagine we are living in a strategic drones like this one. We call it the Night Watchman. It patrols the streets, often spotted in the evenings and at nights. Initially many of us were annoyed by its low dull hum. But then, like everything else, we got used to it.

Now what if you could see the world through its eyes? See how it constantly logs every resident of our neighborhood, logging the kids who play football in the no-ball game area and marking them as statutory nuisances. And then see how it disperses this other group who are teenagers with the threat of an autonomously issued injunction. And then there's this giant floating disc called Madison. Its glaring presence is so overpowering I can't help but stare at it. But it feels like each time I look at it, it knows a little more about me. Like it keeps flashing all these bright and air adverts at me as if it knows about the holiday I'm planning. I'm not sure if I find this mildly entertaining or just entirely invasive.

Back to the present. In creating this future we learned a lot. Not just about how these machines work, but what it would feel like to live alongside them. While drones like Madison and Night Watchman in these particular forms are not real yet, most elements of our drone future are in fact very real today. For instance, facial recognition systems are everywhere in our phones, even in our thermal stats and in cameras around us at ease, keeping a record of everything we do. Whether it's an advertisement we glance at or a protest we attended. These things are here and we often don't understand how they work and what their consequences could be. And we see this all around us. This difficulty in even imagining how the consequences of our actions today will affect our future.

Last year where I live in the UK there was a referendum where the people could vote for UK to leave the EU or stay in the EU, popularly known as Brexit. And soon after the results came out a word began to surface called Brigret. Describing people who chose to vote for Brexit as a protest but without thinking through its potential consequences. And this disconnect is evident in some of the simplest things. Say you go out for a quick drink. Then you decide you wouldn't mind a few more. You know you will wake up in the morning feeling awful but you just defied by saying that other means the future will deal with that. As we find out in the morning that future you is you.

When I was growing up in India in the late 70s and early 80s there was a feeling that the future both needed to and could actually be planned. I remember my parents had to plan for some of the simplest things. When they wanted a telephone in our house they needed to order it and then wait. Wait for nearly five years before it got installed in our house. And then if they wanted to call my grandparents who lived in another city they needed to book something called a trunk call. And then wait again for hours or even days. And then abruptly the phone would ring at two in the morning and all of us would jump out of our beds and gather around before sheking into it discussing general well-being at two in the morning. Today it can feel like things are happening too fast. So fast that it can become really difficult for us to form an understanding of our place in history. It creates an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and anxiety and so we let the future just happen to us. We don't connect with that future us. We treat our future selves as a stranger and the future as a foreign land. We saw foreign land is unfolding right in front of us continually being shaped by our actions today. We are that future. And so I believe fighting for a future we want is more urgent and necessary than ever before.

We have learned in our work that one of the most powerful means of affecting change is when people can directly, tangibly and emotionally experience some of the future consequences of their actions today. Earlier this year the government of the United Arab Emirates invited us to help them shape their country's energy strategy all the way up to 2050. Based on the government's economic data we created this large city model and visualized many possible futures on it. So as I was excitedly taking a group of government officials and members of energy companies through one sustainable future on our model, one of the participants told me, I cannot imagine that in the future people will stop driving cars and start using public transport. And then he said, there's no way I can tell my own son to stop driving his car. But we were prepared for this reaction. Working with scientists in a chemistry lab in my home city in India we had created approximate samples of what the air would be like in 2030 if our behavior stays the same. And so I walked the group over to this object that emits vapor from those air samples. Just one wave of the noxious polluted air from 2030 brought home the point that no amount of data can. This is not the future you would want your children to inherit.

While something like air from the future is very effective and tangible, the trajectory from our present to future consequences now is so linear. Even when a technology is developed with utopian ideals, the moment it leaves the laboratory and enters the world it is subject to forces outside of the creator's control. For one particular project we investigated medical genomics. The technology of gathering and using people's genetic data to create personalized medicine. We were asking what are some of the unintended consequences of linking our genetics to healthcare. To explore this question further we created a fictional lawsuit and brought it to life through 31 pieces of carefully crafted evidence. So we built an illegal genetic clinic, a DIY carbon dioxide incubator and even bought frozen mice on eBay. So now let's go to that future where this lawsuit is unfolding and meet the defendant, Arnold Mann.

Arnold has been prosecuted by this global giant biotech company called Dynamic Genetics because they have evidence that Arnold has illegally inserted the company's patented genetic material into his body. How when else did Arnold manage to do that? Well they all started when Arnold was asked to submit a saliva sample in this pit kit to the NHI, the UK's National Health Insurance Service. When Arnold received his health insurance bill he was shocked and scared to see that his premiums had gone through the roof beyond anything he or his family could ever afford. The state's algorithm had scanned his genetic data and found the risk of a chronic health condition lurking in his DNA. And so Arnold had to start paying towards the potential costs of their future disease, potential future disease from today. In that moment a fair and panic Arnold slipped through the city into the dark shadows of this illegal clinic for treatment. A treatment that would modify his DNA so that the state's algorithm would no longer see him as a risk and his insurance premiums would become affordable again. Arnold was caught and the legal proceedings in the case dynamic genetics versus man began.

In bringing such a future to life what was important to us was that people could actually touch, see and feel its potential because such an immediate and close encounter provokes people to ask the right questions. Questions lie, what are the implications of living in a world where I'm judged on my genetics or who might claim ownership to my genetic data and what might they do with it? If this feels even slightly out there or farfetched, today there's a little known building passed through the American Congress known as HR1313, the Preserving Employee Wellness Program Act. This bill proposes to amend the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, popularly known as Gina, and would allow employers to ask about family medical history and genetic data to all employees for the first time. Those who refuse would face large penalties. In the work I've shown so far, whether it was drones or genetic crimes, these stories describe troubling futures with the intention of helping us avoid those futures. But what about what we can't avoid?

Today, especially with climate change, it looks like we are heading for trouble. And so what we want to do now is to prepare for that future by developing tools and attitudes that can help us find hope. And hope that can inspire action. Currently we are running an experiment in our studio. It's a work in progress. Based on climate data projections, we are exploring a future where the Western world has moved from abundance to scarcity. We imagine living in a future city with repeated flooding, periods with almost no food in supermarkets, economic instabilities, broken supply chains. What can we do to not survive, but prosper in such a world? What can we eat? To really step inside this question, we are building this room in a flat in London from 2050. It's like a little time capsule that we reclaim from the future. We stripped it down to the bare minimum. Everything we lovingly put in our homes like flat panel TVs, internet connected fridges and artisanal furnishings all had to go. And in its place, we are building food computers from abandoned, salvaged and repurposed materials. We are building today's waste into tomorrow's dinner. For instance, you've just finished building our first fully automated fog ponnix machine. So it uses the technique of fog ponnix, so just fog is a nutrient, not even water or soil to grow things quickly. At the moment, you've successfully grown tomatoes. But we'll need more food than what we can grow in this small room. So what else could be forage from the city?

Earlier, we brought back air from the future. This time, we are bringing an entire room from the future, a room from our hope, tools and tactics to create positive action in hostile conditions. Spending time in this room, a room that could be our own future home, makes the consequences of climate change and food insecurity much more immediate and tangible. What we are learning through such experiments and our practice and the people we engage with is that creating concrete experiences can bridge the disconnect between today and tomorrow. By putting ourselves into different possible futures, by becoming open and willing to embrace the uncertainty and discomfort that such an act can bring, we have the opportunity to imagine new possibilities. We can find optimistic futures, we can find parts forward, we can move beyond hope into action. It means we have the chance to change direction, a chance to have our voices heard, a chance to write ourselves into a future we want. Other worlds are possible. Thank you.