“What if?” is where almost every invention starts. Science fiction writers have played with that question for generations, dreaming up machines decades before the labs caught up. What If? hands the question to ordinary people.
We describe a technology that sounds impossible and ask them how it should exist in their world. Once they’ve built it in their imagination, we tell them it’s already real, and ask them “How do you feel about that?”
What if?
Limited episodic non-fiction series
Each episode starts with one question. What if you could talk to dead people? What if you could eat your city park? What if a dancer could feel every earthquake on the planet inside her body? The person being asked is not an expert. They might be a teenager at the library, a grandmother in a community garden, or a choreographer at the studio. We don't explain the science to them. We just give them the premise and time, and ask them to build it out: who would use it, what it would do to their family, their block, their country. Or whether it should be stopped before anyone gets the chance.
After we've used world-building processes and techniques to build out an illustrative version of what they imagined, we reveal that the technology already exists. We show them where it exists, who made it, and how it is or will be used. Then we ask how they feel now.
The series grows out of a workshop I've run for years with groups from many different organizations and communities. I was fascinated by what people imagined, and by how they reacted to the reveal. Over and over, everyday people came up with uses that went further than anything the developers had planned. I also saw how far behind most people's sense of the present really is. Technologies that would reshape their lives already existed, and they had no idea. That felt like a missed opportunity in both directions: to optimize the best uses of emerging technology with greater input, and to mitigate the harms that could come from a lack of diversity of thought around the technology development and implementation. Only a relative few get to decide what happens with inventions, even though those decisions can affect every person on the planet. It felt important to democratize the imagination of the future more.
One example I hold dear came from a young Black man I asked, "What if ancestral AI existed, an AI built by a person before they died, trained on their memories, beliefs, knowledge and culture?" He said he'd create his AI persona in augmented reality and program it to go around to bus stops, sit with people, and ask "how you doing?" in a folksy accent. Then I showed him the USC Shoah Foundation's interactive testimonies with Holocaust survivors, and BINA48. His idea was generous, endearing and emotionally intelligent, and nobody building those systems had thought of it.
That gap is what the show is about. The people building the future and the people who will live in it are rarely in the same room. When someone designs a technology before learning it exists, they reveal things about what they actually want from it that no focus group or press release would ever surface. When they learn it's real, sometimes they're thrilled, sometimes scared, and sometimes they want in.
Episode shape
The question. A participant gets one speculative technology and a description of what it does.
The build. They design how it should work in the world, using world-building techniques, sketches, props, friends, an argument with their kid.
The reveal. We cut to the real thing: the lab, the company, the researcher, the footage. The participant gets to meet the makers or other experts in the technology.
How do you feel now. We stay with the reaction, whatever it is. We don't resolve it for them.
Making it (some episodes). If the participant wants to realize their version, we follow the producing process: who they'd need to work with, especially collaborators from fields they've never touched, what it would cost, and who owns it.