What is the Future?

Futures are multiple, contested and complex. In

Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future’ (quoted Mumford 1922: 22). Before the nineteenth century, the future was rarely understood as a very different place, as an undiscovered country.

According to Adam and Groves, futures are told, tamed, traded, transformed, traversed, thought, tended and transcended (2007). Especially significant is trading in futures, which involves a major break in the trajectory taken by societies.

Visions of futures, whether dystopic or utopic, may indeed engender futures, as they are part performative and not merely analytic or ‘representational’.

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.

is only if a potential innovation comes to be successfully inserted within specific social practices that it will become core as people's lives get reorganized around it. Innovations thus presuppose transformations in underlying social practices. New practices can be difficult to engender by hierarchical policy imposition or by commercial advertisi

societies face crisis when they're hit by multiple shocks simultaneously or they're affected by multiple stresses simultaneously’ (2006:

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).

States, corporations, universities, cities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future; that foreign country is now everywhere.

This may be true, for example, of driverless cars, around which there is currently enormous excitement being generated by their developers but no clear sense of just what social practices they will enable.