Futures thinking

You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability.

The present findings also show that it is possible to develop systems that can instantly interpret emotional cues to provide immediate and intuitive feedback in a wide range of situations. This could lead to scalable, cost-efficient applications in various domains where understanding emotional context is crucial, such as therapy and interpersonal... See more

I believe that in nearly every instance where science fiction has successfully ‘predicted’ a turn of events, it’s more true to say that it has inspired that turn of events.

To meet these challenges and increase the impact of foresight work, we need to rethink our approach from the very beginning of a project.

In recent years, neuroimaging has provided evidence to suggest that imagining the future relies on much of the same neural machinery as remembering the past. One hypothesis that such findings motivate is that memories must be reactivated in order to extract the information needed to “flesh out” detailed simulations. Indeed, if simulations involve... See more

Those of us who recognize that we’ve been here before are the ones who have to call attention to where we are heading.

Digital feedback loops are helping us see that our media, technology, culture, economy, and natural world all have at least as much of a cyclical character as a linear one.

It’s not a matter of banishing linearity and progress

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a particularly vivid form of future thinking: the imaginative construction or simulation of scenarios that might occur in one’s future. We hypothesized that the flexible use of episodic details from memory during imaginative simulations of the future can help to understand constructive aspects of memory, such as its susceptibility to distortion... See more