Task 12: Speculative Futures

Prompt: Describe or narrate a scenario about a curriculum found two generations into a future in which a profound historical evolution has occurred. Your description should address issues related to environment and elicit feelings of awkwardness.

 

For this project I decided to combine the two options that we were provided. I wrote the beginning of my narrative scenario entirely on my own, and then had ChatGPT use the prompt, TFTF Cards, and my scenario to compile the rest of my narrative. My reflection can be found below.

My “Thing From the Future” cards

Narrative Scenario – Written by Nick

In the not so distant future, climate change has reaked havoc on humanity. The area’s surrounding the equiator are no longer fit for living. Water evaportates quickly as it his the sandy dry earth, crops cannot grow, and the few humans that remain live underground. The poorest of the poor, the ones who could not afford to escape when the worlds governments began to evacuate the masses. Massive walls have been erected at borders to keep the sand and dust out of the remaining livable areas. Humans are constantly having to retreat inland as sea levels continue to rise from the artic and antartic poles melting.

ChatGPT’s addition

Now, two generations later, in the year 2184, what remains of organized society is concentrated in “Haven Zones”—massive, climate-controlled megastructures stretching from underground bunkers to towering spires. Each Haven is governed by a conglomerate of corporate-nation alliances, and entry is strictly monitored through biometric passports. These digital IDs not only track citizenship, but also ecological ancestry—recording a family’s historical carbon footprint and consumption patterns across generations.

In schools, the new curriculum is centered around “Eco-Heritage Studies”—a subject equal parts history, shame, and nationalism. Students trace their family’s environmental lineage back to the 21st century, analyzing their ancestors’ environmental decisions and carbon scores. Homework includes confronting difficult truths: Did your great-grandparents drive SUVs? Eat beef weekly? Fly for leisure?

Awkwardness is part of the learning process. Students are sorted into “Green Legacy” and “Grey Legacy” cohorts based on their ecological inheritance. While officially framed as a tool for empathy and responsibility, the division seeps into playground banter and even job placements later on. The term “Greyie” has become a slur in some Havens.

Passports have taken on a new weight—no longer a mere travel document, but a symbol of privilege, burden, and belonging. Children learn how to read them as early as age seven. Curriculum modules ask students to rewrite their family’s passport entries, imagining how their ancestors might have chosen differently. For many, it’s their first encounter with intergenerational guilt.

Meanwhile, the terrain of home has transformed. Home is not a place but a status—access to clean air, light, and a piece of shared garden space. The idea of “owning” a home is taught as a relic of the past, like dial-up internet or single-use plastic.

The most telling part of the curriculum is the silence around certain topics. The true death toll of The Great Retreat. The nations that never built walls. The whispers that some passports were forged, or inherited by violence. These gaps are where the real education begins—where students begin to ask, “Whose growth was this?”

Reflection

This was an interesting task, and one that I thought was befitting of using AI to assist me in its completion. I had a vision for what I would like my scenario and world to look like, however it was not rich in specific details. ChatGPT’s portion of the scenario is chilling, it builds on my notion of receding and disappearing land, and incorporates the idea of home and passports in a way that is befitting of the task. This speculative design narration helps me reflect on the problems of today’s society by connecting the notion of “owning a home”, “dial up internet”, and “single use plastics”. These modern issues are things that I personally struggle with in my own life today. The idea of owning a home is becoming more and more distant as I get older and the prices of houses continue to outpace my income.

By using AI in this assistive way, by giving it a prompt, parameters, and a starting point, I was able to use it to help design a speculative vision of the future based on the task and some of my own thinking. It’s incredible how I could ask ChatGPT for 50 more variations of this story based on the same parameters and it could present them within a few short moments. It makes me question whether this is an enhancement of my own creativity, or a replacement for my own thinking? How much of my original content would I need to present to an AI in order for it to be considered “assistive” rather than “generative”?

The articles, podcasts, and readings from this week present us with a challenge unique to our time period. Speculative design as shared in Beyond Speculative Design: Past – Present – Futureis a tool that we can use not only to design the future, but to reflect on the past and present. A way for us to hold up a mirror to our society and critically evaluate and think about the world we live in today and how we want the future to look. The article Reboot for the AI revolution presents many of these issues, one of which is that we become too reliant on AI and too inflexible to work productively in a society that is rapidly changing. As Masters students of educational technology, how can we help prepare not only ourselves, but others for this future? With governments being notoriously slow at making change, how can humanity hope to thrive in a world dominated by algorithms? This quick activity demonstrates the power of what ChatGPT is already capable of, and it’s important to remember that this is the worstAI will ever be… It will only continue to get faster, more accurate, and more powerful as time moves on.

References

Harari, Y. N. (2017). Reboot for the AI revolution. Nature International Weekly Journal of Science, 550(7676), 324-327.

Mitrović, I., Auger, J., Hanna, J., & Helgason, I. (Eds.). (2021). Beyond Speculative Design: Past – Present – Future. SpeculativeEdu; Arts Academy, University of Split.