For the first series from the Headway initiative, we followed up on forecasts from decades past to ask what the passage of time has revealed. Credit...Mike Haddad Our forebears had a lot of ideas about where we’d be by now. Go back just a few years, and you’ll find no end of prophecies about the world we’d inhabit today - tech fantasies of roads filled with self-driving machines, dire visions of critical water sources gone dry, projections of cities and markets growing and shrinking. In The Times of even a decade ago, the year 2020 was considered a rich canvas for visions of the future, “far enough in the distance to dream, yet seemingly within arm’s reach.” Imagining futures - to pursue, avoid, or merely prepare for - is how we often wrestle with change in the present. Yet our ability to envision - and therefore shape - the future is constantly pressed in by the world we inhabit today. Few people, even a decade ago, could have imagined how we began 2021: under lockdowns against a deadly virus, with a U.S. president on trial for impeachment, about to undergo a transition of power tainted for the first time in more than a century by violence. Yet despite such explosive change, we’re still stuck on a path to warming the planet beyond what would be livable for humankind. Until a year ago, the fastest vaccine ever developed had taken four years to reach the world; now we’re wondering how much of the world the fastest vaccine ever developed will reach. We can’t slow down time, but we can widen the span of our attention. So I want to start a conversation with you, and I’m hoping it can last a couple years. I’m writing to you as the editor of Headway, a new team at The New York Times that is exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress. And I could use your help answering a hairy, urgent question: The Headway team and I would like you to help us define progress: how we measure it, and how we make... |