Futures are multiple, contested and complex. In

In the case of super-wicked problems, there are extra issues: time is running out to find a ‘solution’, there is no central orchestrating authority, those seeking to solve the issue are also in part causing it, and there is what can be called ‘hyperbolic discounting’, which massively favours immediate rewards over rewards arriving much later.

Geels and Smit term such new technological niches as ‘hopeful monstrosities’ (2000: 879–80). Technology innovators often hype the possibilities of the new as representing unambiguous ‘progress’ in order to attract attention, and especially funding, for what is often a rather limited system in the initial stage. The

This slowness of change stems from many limits on futures. Such limits include cognitive and non-cognitive human capacities, the embedded practices and traditions within each society, the

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.

The future may present a promissory note that helps to transform the present in the direction of progress

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

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

They are sociomaterial; power is as much material/technological as it is social.