Entries tagged with: Foresight

13 result(s) displayed (1 - 13 of 13):

The Future Isn't What It Used to Be (TL;DR version)

Technology foresight has been stuck for the last 10-20 years; we need to be paying more attention to social-cultural futurism....

Posted on January 17, 2012 12:34 PM

The Future Isn't What It Used to Be

Foresight is not about making predictions. Rather, it's a tool for identifying dynamics of change, in part by exploring the implications of those changes. This is a point I've made often enough that even I'm sick of it --...

Posted on January 17, 2012 12:18 PM

The Future is a Virus (my Swedish Twitter University "talk")

Not literally, of course. But if we think about the future as something that infects us, we gain a new perspective on our world. Human civilization has a weak immune system when it comes to futures. We can sometimes recognize...

Posted on December 12, 2011 12:33 PM

"To Prevail"

The following is my essay for Joel Garreau's Prevail Project. I have in front of me a late 1960s advertisement from the Burroughs Corporation. It shows a sketch of a guy — in a snappy suit and crisp haircut —...

Posted on November 29, 2011 5:24 AM

The Prevail Project

Joel Garreau has one of the most sensitive radars for big changes of anyone that I know. I first met him back at GBN, and I quickly came to realize that I should pay very close attention to whatever he's...

Posted on November 29, 2011 5:15 AM

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...

Posted on September 28, 2011 12:39 PM

Sanity

Yesterday, on Twitter, I posted this: When the present is filled with tragedy and idiocy, focusing on the future is my way of staying sane. That was my oblique reaction to the terrorism in Norway and the disastrous efforts to...

Posted on July 26, 2011 3:03 PM

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...

Posted on April 26, 2011 3:36 PM

Dear Mr. President...

The good folks at Worldchanging asked me to offer up a hundred words for what the new president of the US should do in the first hundred days in office. I figured that most of the folks they asked would...

Posted on October 29, 2008 5:16 PM

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...

Posted on March 17, 2008 6:35 PM

Paul Saffo on Forecasting

Paul Saffo gave the Long Now Seminar tonight. Here are some of his more telling observations: The biggest mistake a forecaster can make is to be more certain than the facts suggest. When changes cluster at the extremes, it's a...

Posted on January 11, 2008 11:50 PM

Responsible Nanotechnology

(The following is an essay I wrote for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology's December 2007 newsletter.) How soon could molecular manufacturing (MM) arrive? It's an important question, and one that the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology takes seriously. In our recently...

Posted on December 28, 2007 6:34 PM

Thursday Topsight, September 21, 2006

Returning to the multiple links in a post format in an (unsuccessful) effort to curb my verbosity. • What Could Have Been: Al Gore's recent speech at the NYU School of Law has received ample coverage in both the activist...

Posted on September 21, 2006 1:37 PM

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