My granddaughter calls it the wibbles

I sat next to a woman named Karen on a flight to Boston for MIT Future Fest¹. She worked in environmental science. We talked for a few minutes about what we each do.

She grew up before the internet. She said technology feels crazy to her now, and she wanted to know where it's going.

One thing worries her. In her city the local journalists are shutting down, and big news outlets are taking their place. Local reporters are the ones who cover a high school award or a park clean-up drive. She's afraid that when nobody covers those small things, people will feel isolated, even with all the information they can get to.

I do futures work, so I told her about some of the things I've come across. She got a kick out of it.

I think of solving a problem as carving a sculpture, and futures work is one kind of problem. You start with power tools. They take off a lot at once and you don't have much control, but you get the general shape. Then you and your team pick up chisels. That part takes expertise and taste, and it's where the details go in. At the end you have the object you needed.

Then we both went back to our own things.

A while later she was looking out the window and said, "I wish I could see what all that stuff out there is."

GPS wasn't working on the plane, but we had Wi-Fi, and the plane's Wi-Fi page reports where the plane is. A couple of prompts later I had a live map running. It was a topographic map, the kind she knew from her work with geology, with Wikipedia articles about the places nearby in a panel on the side. That was the first time I've been able to just make something like that on the spot.

This is the same map. If you're not on a plane, use your location or click the map to place one. It also has its own page.

The map was trivial to make. Her reaction to it, and watching her poke around in it, meant the world to me.

There is an absurd amount of information out there now. Most of my time goes to solving problems. I think people who know a field should also put some effort into making sure parts of the population don't get left behind. For me that means spending time showing what we do in a simple way, so the tools feel less mysterious. My guess is that once something feels approachable, curiosity does the rest and people start making things with it.

It was brief, but I think the two of us built a small community on that plane, by talking and with a bit of tech.

At one point Karen said, "Oh, I'm so scared of turbulence. My granddaughter calls it the wibbles."