Luke Goode: Future still to play for

When new professor Luke Goode arrived from the UK to take up a role in Film and Media Studies at the University of Auckland in 2001, he thought it would probably be “an adventure for three to five years”.

Twenty-five years later, he’s built a whole life here, led the establishment of a highly successful degree in communication at Auckland, and is about to give his inaugural lecture.

For the past ten years, his research interests have centred on critical futures studies, an interdisciplinary field that explores how societies imagine, prepare for and shape what lies ahead.

Rather than trying to predict the future, an impossible task, his work examines the social, political and cultural assumptions that influence how people think about it, he says.

"My whole approach is to push against the idea that the possibilities we have now are as narrow as people say.”

However, he believes many of the fears people have are justified, given the intersecting problems of climate change, geopolitical instability, economic insecurity and rapidly evolving technology; notably AI.

"We are facing incredible, interacting and unprecedented risks which require intergenerational, longer-term frameworks."

He says what’s needed is ‘cathedral thinking’.

“As in, the people who built cathedrals hundreds of years ago often knew they probably wouldn’t be alive to see them finished, but they built them anyway.”
 

Discussions about the future can so often become paralysed by pessimism, says Goode, and there’s a difference between optimism and hope.

“I think optimism breeds complacency, and hope is only productive if it's connected with concrete ideas. It’s possible to be honest about the problems we face without them becoming overwhelming and debilitating.”

Part of this work has involved examining real-world disasters, often in collaboration with colleague Steve Matthewman, a professor of sociology at Auckland.

“We’ve looked at the way disasters can be understood as exposing inbuilt problems, but also as yielding interesting kinds of possibilities, like for example, the issue of homelessness during Covid-19.

"They way it was dealt with so quickly and effectively by finding emergency and temporary accommodation for people, even if they weren’t longer term solutions, shows what can be achieved with enough political will.”

Many people hoped Covid, with its clear skies through lack of air pollution and more cooperative ways of living, might change how we did things, but unfortunately, it didn’t, says Goode.

“Basically, we just went back to normal. It was a profound failure to learn from a crisis."

He’s sceptical about the much hyped ‘near future’ of AI; unleashing deadly viruses, eating up every human job and just generally raging out of control, as featured in the daily media stories which are shoving the biggest issue facing humanity – climate change – off the news agenda, he believes.

"It's kind of ridiculous, on one level, to ascribe even the possibility of human-like agency and consciousness to software, however powerful that software is.”

Of serious concern however, he says, is how AI is becoming integrated into things like our energy and military infrastructures.

“Which means the stakes of technological failure are really huge. I think those are bigger risks than a kind of super intelligent AI going rogue and deciding its interests conflict with those of humanity."

A tradition of an inaugural lecture is looking back to where you came from and in Goode’s case, that started in England’s West Midlands.

After completing A-Levels at “a normal comprehensive school,” and not overly distinguishing himself academically, beyond a flair for economics, he took a gap year before enrolling in Communication Studies at what is now Nottingham Trent University, where he suddenly realised he loved what he was learning, and the people teaching him.

“I had such brilliant lecturers at both undergraduate level and during my honours degree.”

He completed his PhD in 1999 at Nottingham and began teaching in Leeds before making the move to New Zealand with his former wife and two young daughters.

“I came here and found myself in a department that was heavily slanted towards film studies, and I felt slightly out of my comfort zone because that’s not me at all. But they were nice people to work with (Roger Horrocks, Nick Perry, Annie Goldson) and I had fun.

“Fast forward, and I ended up working alongside Annie, Ethan Plaut, Bingjuan Xiong and Margaret Henley, setting up this new communication degree and becoming our own unit, which has been very successful.”

This coincided with a surge worldwide in universities offering degrees in communication to keep up with the rise of mass media, especially digital media, which created a massive job market for media professionals; as well as the fact that corporates realised they needed trained professionals to handle their public relations.

In terms of gratitude, his close colleagues at Auckland, his siblings, daughters Charia and Aggie, and his partner Suzanne Woodward will be top of the ‘thank you list,’ he says.

“I wasn’t going to apply for professor because it felt like too much work, but Suzanne and my colleague and friend Steve Matthewman kind of bullied me! They both really helped with feedback and suggestions.”

He also wants to “celebrate and thank” his siblings Nathan, Hannah, and the late Saul.

“We’ve kept each other safe and sane since we were kids.”

Goode often feels heartened, he says, by the survey he gives his Stage Three ‘Technology Futures’ course, taken by at least 120 students each year, on their feelings about the future, which he says are “sobering but not entirely fatalistic”.

"We've got a real challenge on our hands in social sciences, arts and humanities. On one hand, we must do justice to the scale of crisis and the risks we face on multiple fronts, and yet on the other, to the possibilities that still exist.

“We must resist giving in to fatalism.”