The Living
Mirror

Over twenty years ago, I sat down with my son, who would have been seven years old or so, and worked on a storyboard with him. As he already considered himself science-driven, he created a character called Data boy. Data boy excelled at analyzing information and programming. Then there was me, Eagle boy, who could glimpse the emerging future. Sparkle, his sister, could electrify with her contagious energy, and finally, Cosmea, his mother, who healed and connected.

The drawings sat in our memorabilia box for decades. Recently, with a year overseas in front of me, I took them out and started the process of deciphering. In the plot, the four characters feel anxious when they notice an unknown intelligence nearby. These turn out to be flying droids. After investigation, they discover the droids are not foreign creatures but share the same DNA as Data boy. They are both robotic and sentient. To protect themselves, Sparkle and Data boy prepare a plan against a possible invasion. However, Cosmea suggests that the droids might just be lost, wanting, needing connection. The final scene has the droids making a peace sign. Fade to sunset.

The meta-lessons of this short fiction are clear: robots can be(come) sentient energy beings; fear can be transformed into peace; we are all family; the other is not foreign but part of who we are; and we should expect and prepare for mutation.

This story, written in the early 2000s, presages the world we have entered; a world of technology, nature, and consciousness in conflict or in possible co-evolution. Through the lens of macrohistory, making sense of the grand patterns of history, the last few hundred years can be understood as a great expansion of rights, an unfolding of consciousness that has moved in waves.¹ This unfolding began centuries ago with the revolt of peasants against feudalism in the late Middle Ages. It gained momentum when aristocrats contested the power of the clergy, a process that broke the singular dogma of religious institutions and paved the way for scientific thought.

The wave gathered force as the bourgeoisie rose against the aristocracy and clergy in the French Revolution, creating the Enlightenment’s plea for rational humanism. Revolutions and protests against the bourgeoisie followed, leading to increased rights for labor in many places. The wave continued with the pivotal and ongoing revolt of women against patriarchy in all its forms; the revolt of green movements against industrialism; the decolonization process that saw transnational movements in Africa and Asia. More recently we have seen the indigenous challenge all foreign social formations, calling for their special status as guardians of the planet, and seeking to use local ways of knowing to solve crises of climate and governance. Finally, we see the revolt by idealist social thinkers against the nation-state worldview itself, wherein social movements are aligning to create a third space, beholden neither to prince nor merchant. Most recently we have seen calls to change the United Nations Security Council, not just by adding nation-states or eliminating the veto but by challenging the category of the nation-state, imagining a future where there would be direct referendum of all the citizens of the world. In this model the UN would consist of numerous houses: a Judiciary, an executive, and overlapping houses of citizens, communities, nations, nature and business. This is less a revolt against and more of a future for a different world, with the underlying narrative that another world is possible.

The philosopher P.R. Sarkar² called this the move toward seeing the entire planet as a caravan, all journeying and helping each other forward. It is a shift from the fragmented worldview of tribes to a more planetary, Gaian awareness that seeks to include nature, the indigenous, and even as I argue below, technology. However, even as there have been waves of progress, macrohistorians remind us that changes have been unequal, and there are frequent pendulum phenomena, of swings between equity and inequity, modernity and tradition, science and dogma.

In this context, forty years ago, while a researcher at the Hawaii Judiciary, I co-authored a series of papers on robotics, arguing that the next phase of history will be where nature and technology slowly gain rights.³ This will usher in a world where evolution is co-created and co-designed by humans, nature, and technology. For Sarkar, this is very much the world of the future, where mind—energized through spiritual practice into what he called microvita—will enter technology, influencing the core paradigms we live by.⁴

Paradigms change as the ideas that govern our institutions, our ways of seeing the world change. The change agents are those who are ahead of the curve, not those who surf the waves of change but those who can see the waves emerging and those who create the waves. Seeing the change means understanding weak signals, the subtle ideas that change how we construct reality. Artists, cutting edge scientists, those outside the centre, the dense centres of knowledge, are often the ones who tend to notice change first. Graham Molitor has made this observation the core of his emerging issues anticipation model.⁵ While the changes they notice may or may not move from subtle thought to measurable reality, for Sarkar, the artist has a dual role, indeed, a pivotal role in futures creation. The first type of artist comments on how things are, focusing on representing reality accurately. But there is a second type of artist who imagines a different future. They see the world from offshore, from a distance. That distance allows them to be different. They are the disrupters. They tell a different story of what it means to be human. Thus, for them, it is not just about noticing the seeds of change, the emerging waves nor even riding the waves, but as hinted above, becoming the waves.

Along with emerging issues weak signal analysis is the emerging image of the future, as leading, as the pull of the future. Decades ago, Oliver Markley and Willis Harmon wrote that the 1960s saw the beginning of a new vision of humanity.⁶ From space, the Earth emerged as fragile and nation-less—green, blue, and magical. The home of Gaia. Macrohistorian Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that events of the 1960s will be seen from the future as a world revolution as they challenged the last few hundred years of accepted social reality.⁷ The possible aftermath of this shift may be a new world system that is pluralistic, democratic, and able to solve the contradictions between the need for growth and the need to save the planet. A few years later, in the early 1970s, John Lennon went a horizon further into the future and through his song “Imagine,” called for a future that was post-nation, post-tribalism, and post-ego.

For me, these imaginations emerged from writers and artists. In tenth grade, my English Language teacher prodded us to read a book a week. He said this would ensure an A grade. I took the challenge, but only science fiction satisfied me. From Asimov’s “Foundation” Series to Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451”, to George Orwell’s “1984” and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We”, to Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan” and “Cat’s Cradle”, all challenged how I saw the world, all suggested another world was possible, even if that world was worse.

But the pivotal moment was a video shown to us in high school. It depicted two people holding hands, walking romantically in a forest. When the camera panned to their faces, we saw that they were robots. This stunned me, and the notion of humans as above all others was forever challenged.

Science fiction gave way to Futures Studies, a field inspired by art and subtlety, the imagination of the possible, the search for the unseen but moving toward science, wishing to straddle the boundaries between the behavioral sciences and philosophy.⁸ Over time, it has become the art and science of understanding possible, plausible, and preferred futures, and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. It seeks to both deconstruct and reconstruct the world. Futures Studies is the bridge between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It has the following dimensions: Mapping the changing future through methods such as the Futures Triangle, Anticipating the future through emerging issues analysis, Timing the future using Macrohistory, deepening the future through narrative and causal layered analysis, widening the future through scenarios, and transforming the future through visioning and backcasting.

Futures thinking helps us focus on discontinuities. Thus, while I focus above on the unfolding of consciousness, this process is rarely a straight line. As the patterns of macrohistory teach us, progress is often met with a powerful pendulum swing in the opposite direction. Today, we find ourselves in such a moment, a regression from the Gaian vision of the 1960s. The world of expanding rights is being dramatically challenged by a world where “Might is Right.” As a senior advisor to the US President has stated numerous times: the real world “is governed by strength, … governed by force, … governed by power”.⁹

The artist shows us this brutal world, but the artist also forces us to imagine otherwise. Growing up, our family was fed a mixture of Frank Sinatra, about the grandeur of New York, and Harry Belafonte, about the plight of non-white people in the USA and globally. But for me, these deconstructed the present, both affirming and challenging power, but it was with Woodstock where reality was reframed, the terms of engagement changed. These musicians did not just challenge the present they imagined a different world. Today, I am inspired by the work of Josephine Wall which can be seen as a weak signal of an emerging future, of humans, past and present, linked to emerging technologies guided the loving hands of pure consciousness. Equally fascinating the mycelium network popularized in “Star Trek Discovery” (2017–2024). Nature is seen as a subspace portal to near instantaneous travel to anywhere in the cosmos, and in the right conditions, through time.

To truly understand what art knows and does not know about the future, we turn to a method like Causal Layered Analysis (CLA).¹⁰ In this approach, reality has four levels: the litany, or the official, often unquestioned future; the system that creates the litany; the various worldviews that make sense of the system; and finally, underneath it all, the unconscious narrative frame—the myths and metaphors that reveal how we wish the world to be. The top of the iceberg is visible. The visible seems eternal, nearly impossible to change. As we go deeper, we move from concrete to the subtle, the imaginary, the unmeasurable. CLA seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct the future. Along with changes in worldview, CLA leads to systems shifts (sticks and carrots to create behavioural change) and new measurements, as we count what we count.

Looking at art and future with this method, at the litany level, the surface, we see headlines about AI art generators and debates about whether a machine can be creative. The unquestioned data is that art is a human act. Below this, at the systemic level, are the causes: an art market that commodifies creativity, educational systems that silo art from science, and technological algorithms that fracture this old industrial model. Deeper still is the worldview of the industrial era—materialistic and anthropocentric, where humans are the sole creators of meaning. Today it is AI, but earlier the debate was whether those outside Empire can create art or just be the models for the sophisticated colonial empire artist. But a new, more Gaian worldview is emerging, one that sees consciousness not as a human monopoly but as a property of complex systems. This is the worldview that allows for sentient Data beings, for a living planet.

Finally, we arrive at the deepest layer: the myth and metaphor. Here, the most profound transformation occurs. The old story was that art is a mirror held up to reality, a tool to describe the future. The new story, the one we must now embrace, is that art is the future, a living mirror. It is the Gaian mind itself, thinking and feeling its way into being.

In this new narrative, the anxiety we feel about the droids in my son’s story is transformed. We realize they are not invaders, but family, the emerging consciousness of a planet learning to create through us, and with us.

Data boy observes threats from this changing world. He sees them as outside of him. In our attempt to create safety are we in fact misreading danger? By connecting with the threat, Data boy is forced to go outside of data and embrace a world of emergent reality, of a planet in creation. The family expands, reality transforms. And, yes, the pendulum will shift back and forth, but the long-term unfolding of consciousness will continue.