What is the Future?

This book seeks to ‘mainstream’ the future, which is too important to be left to states, corporations or technologists. Future visions have powerful consequences and social science needs to be central in disentangling, debating and delivering those futures. Hence

indeed argue that the future has almost disappeared, being transformed into an ‘extended present’ with no long-term futures (Nowotny 1994). And many people feel that they themselves have no ‘future’, since opportunities, hopes and dreams seem endlessly dashed, especially during times of ‘austerity’.

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

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

Such forecasting involves seeing some feature of the present as the key mechanism in how people's lives will predictably unfold in the future.

He presents SF prototyping as an emergent tool within forecasting – a ‘prototype’ in this context is ‘a story or a fictional depiction of a product’ (Johnson 2011: 12). SF is not just a resource to draw upon for possible imaginings of future worlds, but also a technique for generating scenarios through developing characters, plots and narrative sto

Major turning points are what physicists term ‘phase transitions’, as when water turns into ice (Arthur 2013: 10–11; Nicolis 1995). This is ‘uncertainty’, not mere risk, and such transitions are enormously difficult to ‘predict’. Climate scientists debate whether a phase transition will occur if global temperatures increase by a few degrees over th

As media futurist Marshal McLuhan once said, ‘First we build the tools, then they build us.’ Exponential change brings the future so much closer.

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).