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"There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism."

"And on and on. If futurists have become almost too good at technological foresight, we remain woefully primitive in our abilities to examine and forecast changes to cultural, political, and social dynamics.

Why is this? There isn't a single cause. "

"“There are three scenarios: Heaven – in which our inventions conquer pain, suffering, stupidity, ignorance, and even death. Hell – in which our creations wipe out the human race or all of life on earth within a generation. And Prevail – which argues that these first two scenarios are technodeterministic.

“In the Prevail Scenario, what really matters – as always – is not how many transistors we get to talk to each other, but how many ornery, imaginative, unpredictable human beings we can bring together to arrive at surprising ways to co-evolve with our challenges. Because only in this bottom-up way will humans really control their destinies, rather than have them controlled by our creations.”" Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://www.acceler8or.com/2011/12/will-joel-garreau-jamais-cascio-prevail-along-with-the-rest-of-us

"In other words I have a new ambition for my own SF: not as prediction, and not cautionary, either--but aspirational.

The fact is that if I've learned one thing in two years of studying how we think about the future, it's that the one thing that's sorely lacking in the public imagination is positive ideas about where we should be going. We seem to do everything about our future except try to design it. It's a funny thing: nobody ever questions your credentials if you predict doom and destruction. But provide a rosy picture of the future, and people demand that you justify yourself. Increasingly, though, I believe that while warning people of dire possibilities is responsible, providing them with something to aspire to is even more important. The foresight programme has given me a lot of tools to do that in a justifiable way, so I might as well use them."

"Here's another game it's useful to learn how to play if you want to write near-future science fiction: spot the Existential Threat.

An existential threat (for purposes of this thought experiment) is some phenomenon or activity — it may be natural or may be human-contrived — that threatens, in ascending order of threatliness, the survival of (1) technological civilization, (2) the human species itself, (3) life on Earth, or (4) the universe."

"Shell uses scenarios to explore the future. Our scenarios are not mechanical forecasts. They recognise that people hold beliefs and make choices that can lead down different paths. They reveal different possible futures that are plausible and challenge people’s assumptions."

"t’s officially known as the Forecasting World Events Project and is sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Activity (IARPA), a little-known agency run by a woman, Lisa Porter, who is occasionally described as America’s answer to the fictional Agent Q who designs cutting edge gadgets for James Bond. Much of IARPA’s work is classified, as is its budget. But the forecasting project is not classified. Invitations to participate are now on the Internet.

The idea is to raise five large competing teams of people of diverse backgrounds who will be asked to make predictions on fields that range from politics and global security to business and economics, public health, social and cultural change and science and technology. The project is expected to run for four years and stems from the recognition that expert forecasts are very often wrong."

Retro images of the future, from various sources.

The practice of foresight needs within its philosophical underpinnings a similar discourse that treats the fear of dangerous outcomes as a real and meaningful concern, one that can neither be waved away as pessimism nor treated as the sole truth — a "neodicy," if you will. Neodicies would grapple with the very real question of how we can justifiably believe in better futures while still acknowledging the risks that will inevitably arise as our futures unfold. Such a discourse may even allow the rehabilitation of the concept of progress, the idea that as a civilization we do learn from our mistakes, and have the capacity to make our futures better than our past.

Eliot, Pound, Stevens : Medieval, Renaissance, Modern. As if in this trio we have a kind of exemplary recapitulation of the history of the West. Eliot the medieval man : for whom the measure of Man is only to be found in her relationship with God. Eliot's God is in many ways remote & elusive, and he compensates for this by emphasizing the objectivity of dogma, the absolute quality of both the articles of faith & the cultural traditions for which they are the foundation. Pound the Renaissance man : for whom "Man is the measure of all things." In such a situation, calm, peace & stability are elusive, & Pound compensates for this by emphasizing the objectivity of Nature, and the supremacy of the men of inherent power & natural wisdom (Malatesta, the Founding Fathers, Confucius...). Stevens the modern : for whom nature is fundamentally immeasurable & mysterious, and therefore Man-within-nature must imagine her own order (since order is to be found nowhere else).

Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was over, and just as silly. But really I think they’re talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

The field of futures and forecasting is undergoing a revolution. Since the field was founded in the 1950s, the problems futurists must make sense of have become much more complex. The tools we can use-- and could develop-- to follow trends and forecast possible futures have become more sophisticated. The audiences we try to reach have expanded. The media we use to communicate have changed. And our knowledge of how people and groups actually think about and respond to the future has evolved greatly. The purpose of this blog is to make sense of how the field is responding to these changes, and try see where the field is going-- in effect, to forecast the future of futures

So. You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?

In the Uncertain Future, we let you input the full range of your uncertainties — and we show you the distribution over futures that your current, uncertain beliefs imply. We help you create your own picture of the uncertain future.

Profile of Paul Saffo, technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future.

It's a subtle point, but I tend to find it useful to talk about strategic questions in terms of dilemmas, not problems. Problem implies solution--a fix that resolves the question. Dilemmas are more difficult, typically situations where there are no clearly preferable outcomes (or where each likely outcome carries with it some difficult contingent elements). Futures thinking is less useful when trying to come up with a clear single answer to a particular problem, but can be extremely helpful when trying to determine the best response to a dilemma. The difference is that the "best response" may vary depending upon still-unresolved circumstances; futures thinking helps to illuminate possible trigger points for making a decision.

Coeditor of book on Macrohistory

The Idea Index serves as a tool to educate, network, and help solve problems. As an educational tool, the Index is full of hopeful, exciting ideas and solutions to pressing problems. As a networking tool, the Index allows site visitors to contact the project leaders, leave a constructive and/or encouraging comment and connect with one another. It presents a fully searchable database of socially-responsible initiatives, in all stages of development, in need of further funding and support.

so now it's time for the next project: The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong.

The New York Times has a piece (Future Vision Banished to the Past") about the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a "rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence."

Nice little prank on the chaos during the first half of the 20C

participatory, interconnected, leapfrog Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.openthefuture.com%2F2009%2F02%2Ffuturist_scaffolding.html

Signtific is a community website for sharing, exploring, creating and discussing signals and forecasts related to disruptive trends in science and technology.

In my work as a futurist, focusing on the intersection of environment, technology and culture, the concept of resilience has come to play a fundamental role.

While our future vision should fade into an increasingly vast and uncertain fog of possibilities, far future fans instead fragment into factions, each confident in a very different view of the important future issues. Factions use such different assumptions that they rarely build on each others' work, or even engage others in debate. Only they really "get it" you see, and few others ever seriously consider their arguments. Extreme far-thinking apparently produces extreme disagreement.

Such fragmentation may be acceptable when searching a large space for rare combinations, but it is severely dysfunctional for advising common actions. We instead need to find ways for the few people who actually care about the far future to work together via a division of labor. But how can we do that? Just tell each faction to reconsider that they might be mistaken?

The more I've thought about it, the more it strikes me that futurists' practices have evolved in the last forty years to serve a world that is less and less important. This was a world in which small elites-- strategists, CEOs, politicians, people with their hands on nuclear triggers or levers of power-- ran the world (or everyone assumed they did). It was a world in which the future could be considered at particular times-- during strategic reviews or five-year plans. It was a world that we affected through texts, presentations, brainstorming exercises and scenarios.

With the so-called singularity looking farther and farther away, it's time to prepare for the real future. A future where we might not become glamorous, but we might slowly figure out how to prevent a few more diseases that mutate our genomes. Maybe we won't cure death, but we might cure a few kinds of cancer. Maybe we won't have implantable mobile phones, but we might figure out how to bring most of the African continent online.

I guess what I'm saying is that the future might look more like a person in jeans rather than a hottie in face jewelry. Dream about the hottie all you want, but plan to wear jeans.

Here are my key elements of a diverse system -- Diversity, Redundancy, Decentralization, Collaboration, Transparency, Openness, Fail Gracefully, Flexibility, Foresight

blog by Jamais Cascio