Month: January 2021

25th Century Magazine was created by Midierson Maia and it is focused on long-term impacts of disruptive technology. It seeks to bring the reader a debate about the impact and consequences of disruptive innovation. Check out more at https://25thcenturymag.com/

By Midierson Maia and Fabiano Ormaneze

Brazilian artist Mariak, based in the United Arab Emirates, creates a worldwide network of connections focused on sustainability, innovation and social impact.

It is late afternoon and the starlings—small birds that live in flocks in the north of England— organize themselves into their so-called murmuration. It goes beyond a song, or the characteristic noise of synchronized wings flapping. It’s more than that; like a dance, before resting after a full day of hunting for food in the winter days, they connect together in light, choreographed movements. It is also unclear what causes these birds to initiate such a dance. However, physicists and biologists believe that each one, when moving, stimulates seven others to do the same around them, in a continuous progression. Soon, the seven become forty-nine, forty-nine become thousands, and a spectacle is created in the skies. They also become stronger and easily scare off hawks, the main predators of the species, fast in flight and up to four times larger.

Using the birds as a metaphor for life, artist Maria Luiza Knoblauch—or simply Mariak, the name she goes by—was inspired to create the Torus Legacy holding company. The goal is to connect people around the world on the improvements that can be achieved through technology associated with human potential. The idea is that, just like a flock of starlings, together, people can do better and have more social impact. “All the businesses linked to Torus are products, projects, and services related to people who use skills to build their own legacy in the areas of sustainability, innovation, arts, science, and smart technology. All this, together with the happiness of being who they are, as people and as professionals,” explains Mariak. Therefore, the goal is to share experiences and services, and offer participants connections; this way, those involved could grow exponentially based on a large ecosystem with participants from all over the world.

Torus is headquartered in one of the most prosperous places on the planet, Masdar City (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates). Torus has a branch in Dubai, which Mariak fell in love with on her very first visit. This year, coincidentally, is the 100th anniversary of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s birth, considered the father and founder of the Emirates. The idea is that by 2071, when the country’s centenary will be celebrated (Area 2071), the focus will be on creating positive proposals, which will include social transformation, sustainability, and technology, all with global impact.

One of the main Torus Legacy projects is the Legacy Ministry, which connects government, society, and companies that want their activities to support people, promote evolution, and protect the planet. As Mariak says, “you have to merge everyone’s dreams with government needs.” To shape this connection, she designed projects such as the Artificial Intelligence Forest Heritage and Artificial Intelligence Legacy Tree.

Through them, Torus provides an artificial intelligence tree that crosses supply with demand. “The idea is that people can have these trees and put whatever information they wish in there so that we have a large social network.” In the future, the goal is for these people to become like godmothers and godfathers to trees in a real forest. “It will be a great connection for people who make a difference in the Emirates. We will have artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality glasses enabling an immersive experience inside the forest and the possibility to get to know the legacy of people all at the same time,” says the artist. With this, the natural space becomes a great immersive experience, a theme park with the existing technologies. Among them, Mariak cites the possibility of changing the colour of trees through LED lamps according to people’s reactions, and even making plants play music using electromagnetic waves. In addition, these projects are related to issues of great environmental importance, such as global warming, research on the impact of innovation on the environment, concern for water, and research and development on medicinal herbs.

In order to bring the interested parties together, Mariak decided to open the doors of her own home, which can also be used as an office and, in the future, will be a recording studio for materials that can expand Torus’ ideas and proposals. Her way of life is in itself an example of innovation, inventiveness and sustainability; she lives on a boat, where she can meet those in need to make connections based on the holding company proposal. “I have a project to sail around the world one day. But I wanted to have a home where I could, at the same time, talk about my work, use sustainable materials and relate it all to design. In addition, the boat allows me to be closer to the place I love the most, which is nature.” To facilitate access to those who need connections and those who identify with her work, Mariak has other offices in strategic areas of the Emirates.

Another important segment of the work concerns adapting what she has studied and what she is qualified in. She works with concept design projects, interior design, landscaping, and sustainable business models. Therefore, based on what she knows and her desire to strengthen human potential, she has become a source of inspiration for architects, entrepreneurs, suppliers, businesses, and investors in creating sustainable initiatives for the future. With this activity and proposal, Mariak has also been able to implement projects in the Emirates involving partnerships with Brazilian companies.

With activities gradually becoming global, Torus Legacy proofs that the future will not be a dystopia if human potential is worked on and if technologies are used within purposes that consider the characteristics of life in society; all of this while connecting people, knowledge, and geographically distant regions. The year 2071 and even the next century are closer than we think, and the pillars of this future were already raised.

Talk to Mariak: malu.projeto@gmail.com

Forget about dystopia, the future is exponential!

Voicers’ goals merge education and human potential to promote an inclusive society.

By Midierson Maia and Fabiano Ormaneze

Swimming against the tide, future thinker, Ligia Zotini Mazurkiewicz, believes, “The next great revolution will be a moral one, led by children who are now sitting on our laps.” It was with this strong belief that she created Voicers (www.voicers.com.br), a digital and educational start-up that works toward a noble purpose: to democratize access to technology and unite voices that think about the future. The goal is to portray the future—positively and exponentially—helping to avoid technological dystopias.

Before starting Voicers, Ligia, who obtained a bachelor degree in Business Administration, and a master’s in Marketing, had a twelve-year-long career working in multinational companies. She also worked as a Business and Language professor after participating in a Silicon Valley educational mission in 2016. She went back to Brazil determined to quit her job and search for a new purpose. Her heart was set on the idea that access to technology should not be restricted to small groups.

In 2016, as professor, she undertook an initial experiment which would become a major technology-diffusion project aimed at human education and training. “The years I worked in the corporate world were very important and happy years; but there was something that needed to be aligned. I felt the need to combine three characteristics that have always been with me: concern for education; passion for technology; and interest in a planetary consciousness, without borders,” she says.

She taught a course titled “Technology and Leadership in the 21st Century” for undergraduate students at the Faculdade Paulista de Pesquisa e Ensino Superior (FAPPES) during the one- semester course. “Since I could not tackle all the issues on my own, every week I invited someone— a voice—to talk to students. One would wear virtual reality glasses, another would bring a robot or a drone. In addition to this, the guest speakers had other amazing qualities: they were all fantastic human beings, and they all brought the vision to my classes: that appropriate technological training will prevent us from living in a dystopian future,” she says.

Ligia realized she was headed in the right direction and that a new life project was beginning to emerge when she monitored the success of one of the videos from her classes, which had thousands of reactions, comments and shares on social media. “As much as young people are connected to technology, in general, they are not the creators, inventors of all this. This helped the classes become very successful and reach broader audiences,” she recalls. At the same time, she felt that those activities and understanding of the technology linked to the exponential growth of human beings, could not be restricted to the classroom. This is how Voicers came about: focused on spreading ideas by people who anticipate the future and are experts in the areas of technology, science, innovation and, of course, human development.

To outline the project, she first brought together people with whom she had contact in the corporate world, and who are very knowledgeable in their areas. “But I always bear in mind that these partners of mine must be more than just very knowledgeable. That alone is not enough. They must also be lucid human beings with different qualities, including diversity and plurality.”

That’s how Voicers was born, in opposition to the multiple dystopias, which, especially in the movies and series produced in the US, presenting a devastating future. “I do not believe the future will be what Hollywood cinema has become used to showing us, which is to unite the best of technology with the worst in humans. We need to believe in exponential technology where human beings also use all their capacity for transformation,” argues the entrepreneur.

As a digital platform, Voicers currently brings together around 50 professionals from different areas and backgrounds who believe in technology, and in the potential of human beings, as long as educational work is involved. It’s as if these people already lived in the future and used the platform to amplify their voices, helping society prepare for the upcoming decades.

The platform has professionals from different areas such as Communication, Engineering, Administration and Design, who produce videos and broadcast them on the Internet. In addition, there are technological-experience activities aimed at groups, individuals, colleges or companies, as well as face-to-face meetings in various formats known as Tech Talks. The contents are grouped into three main thematic groups: technology, trends, and people in the 21st Century.

Human x Inhuman

Since there have been many literary and cinematographic dystopian productions over the last 50 years, Voicers’ vision is faced with the great challenge by presenting a new possibility for the world to deal with technological advances and with the relationship between human beings and technology. Ligia argues that it is necessary to rethink the relationship between human beings and technology.

“When a machine does something better than a human being, it is, therefore, an inhuman work. What will be left when machines do the work that people used to do? We need to prepare people to create, care, heal, know, and share. That’s our job and our focus,” she explains. When it comes to human relationships in the future, Voicers’ vision is clear on the need to train people to live with diversity and plurality, constructing their own stories regardless of stereotypes and patterns. In addition, we must prepare for changes in the workplace and in the way we teach and learn.

In the future, there will be fewer opportunities for formal employment, which, if properly prepared for, can lead to the surge of great talents. Organized in new forms of employment relationships, the professionals of the future will not seek employment, but rather sources of income, using their talents in a plural form. The group argues that the security of employment contracts and stability can often mask real talents, and in this world, school must never remain centred on the reproduction of content that can be easily accessed. “Skills, in the future, will not be measured by the ability to remember things, but by what people will be able to create,” Ligia says.

Outcomes

After two years into the project, Ligia has already received positive feedback from several technology and automation companies. Despite that, she had to learn to deal with those who only see the negative aspects of technological advances. Some come to ask: “But won’t there be more unemployment?” To these, Ligia generally says: “There will be more people who can become unemployable, that is, they will lose their jobs. These are the people you have to prepare for inventive activities.” And what about fear? How do we deal with it? The answer is similar: The fear we are experiencing is a fear of the unknown, and Voicers’ proposal is to create narratives that would serve as bridges to the future.

Talk to Ligia: ligia@voicers.com.br