What is the Future?

Humans find meaning in their temporality. Being is made visible in its temporal character, and in particular the movement from birth towards death. This view of time is not as a perimeter but rather as permeating each person's being.

The main purpose of war is to achieve the state that would have obtained if there had been no war.

So there are patterned, regular and rule-bound systems; these rule-bound workings can come to generate various unintended effects; and unpredictable events disrupt and abruptly transform what appear to be rule-bound and enduring patterns. This is a view which emphasizes networks of people, of systems, of societies as fundamentally historical, and w

This can be distinguished from the A-series, which involves the relationships of ‘past-to-present-to-future’.

This book shows how it is necessary to avoid the Scylla of technological determinism of the future, but also the Charybdis of completely open futures. The future is neither fully determined, nor empty and open.

William Gibson commented that he omitted certain dystopian notions from his novels because he did not want to be responsible for helping to bring them about.

We will also see below that it is necessary to distinguish between three kinds of futures: the probable, the possible, and the preferable – distinctions drawn from Wendell Bell (Bell, Wau 1971; see Kicker 2009).

Consultants McKinsey and Company and yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur championed 3D printing in a report on the potential of the ‘circular economy’ presented to the 2012 World Economic Forum in Davos (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2012). David

Martin Luther King, for example, argued: ‘Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable …Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals’