Entries tagged with: Futurism
25 result(s) displayed (1 - 25 of 29):
Forensic Futurism
If there's a common trope about "futurism," it's that it gets everything wrong. From jetpacks to vacations on the Moon, any discussion of futurism in broader culture very quickly turns into a listing of the various crazy things that "futurists"...
The Foresight Paradox
In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions: The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful. The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely...
About Foresight (a minor rant)
Why worry about tomorrow? After all, according to one of our most respected thinkers, "always in motion is the future." It's a reasonable question. Consistently accurate predictions about interconnected complex systems are functionally impossible, at least at any real level...
Listening to Foresight
When people learn that I'm a professional futurist*, almost invariably the immediate response is the question "what predictions have you gotten right?" My usual answer is to argue that prediction isn't the what futurists do these days, we're all about...
Evolution
At the Institute for the Future's 2011 Ten Year Forecast event in late March, I presented a long talk on ways in which evolutionary and ecological metaphors could inform our understanding of systemic change. The head of the Ten Year...
"Win the Future"
If you watched the American State of the Union address last night, in part or in total, you couldn't have escaped noticing one particular phrase: "win the future." President Obama used it (or "winning the future") nine times in the...
Neodicy
Warren Ellis did me the great honor of asking me to write a piece for his website, on whatever topic was on my mind. This is what resulted. You can see the posting at Warren's place here; I've reproduced it...
OtF Core: Ethical Futurism (from 2006)
(This is the original Ethical Futurism piece I wrote for Futurismic in 2006; I intend to update and build on it, but I wanted to make sure the original could be found in its entirety here.) What does it mean...
Aspirational Futurism
One of the secondary effects of the latest set of crises to grip the world is the rise of essays and articles from various insightful folks, laying out scenarios of what the future will look like in an era of...
This Changes Everything
You have my permission to slap the next futurist (foresight thinker, scenario strategist, or trend-spotter) who uses the expression "this changes everything" seriously. Slap them hard. Maybe a shin-kick, too, if you're into it. The notion that some new development...
Mozilla Scenarios
Last year, I mentioned obliquely that I had been asked to work on something very, very cool, but couldn't talk about it. Finally, I can: I joined with Adaptive Path to create a set of scenarios of the future...
Fifteen Minutes into the Future
One of the hardest things to grapple with as a futurist is the sheer banality of tomorrow. We live our lives, dealing with everyday issues and minor problems. Changes rarely shock; more often, they startle or titillate, and very quickly...
The Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You
The grand myth of environmentalism is that it's all about saving the Earth. It's not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves. That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central...
Roll +3 vs the Future
At one point during the multiple days of futures workshops held over the last week, one of my colleagues asked me where I'd learned to facilitate groups. After confirming that he thought I was doing it well, and wanted to...
It's the Business of the Future to be Dangerous
The title of this post is a quote from Alfred North Whitehead. What I like about the line is that it can be read in a couple of different ways: the role "the Future" plays in our lives is to...
Futurism and its Discontents
The deputy editor of the Economist, Robert Cottrell, thinks he knows what I'm up to. Well, me and the myriad other folks working to analyze what the future could hold, in order to make better choices. In "The future of...
Making the Future Yours
As a species, Homo sapiens isn't particularly good at thinking about the future. It's not really what we evolved to do. Our cognitive tools developed in a world where rapid and just-accurate-enough pattern recognition and situation analysis meant the difference...
How to Read an End-of-Year Forecast
It seems to be common practice among bloggers, columnists and other species of pundit to offer in the closing days of December a few predictions about the year to come. These usually include some brief sentences about how well or...
New Futurismic Column: Ethical Futurism
My November column for Futurismic is now up, asking the question, what does it mean to be an ethical futurist? ...the first duty of an ethical futurist is to act in the interests of the stakeholders yet to come --...
OtF Audio
A surprising number of people told me, after hearing my interview on Neofiles a couple of weeks ago, that I should give podcasting a try. Consider this a try. I recorded a spoken version of my first Futurismic column, "Futurism...
Futurismic, and Slashdot
I'm now a regulary (monthly) columnist at Futurismic, and my very first piece, A Gadget-Free Futurism, is now up. This is, by and large, a good thing, and I'm happy to have the chance to do the column. The Futurismic...
Tomorrow Makers
If scenario creation was the poster-boy for futurism in the mid-1990s, artifact creation looks to play that role for mid-2000s futurism. Combining strategic foresight with what amounts to concept-car design, efforts such as the Institute for the Future's "Artifacts from...
The Unspoken Word
"But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?" —Wm. Shakespeare,...
Responding to Bruce
Bruce Sterling did me the honor of devoting an entire Beyond the Beyond blog post to my Twelve Things... item from a couple of days ago. He provided an additional service by disagreeing with part of my post, and explaining...
Twelve Things Journalists Need To Know to be Good Futurist/Foresight Reporters
J. Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, and was an economic advisor to President Clinton; Susan Rasky is a senior lecturer in journalism at UC Berkeley, and was an award-winning reporter for the New York Times....
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