Futures thinking

Novel technologies like artificial intelligence or neurotechnology are expected to have social implications in the future. As they are in the early stages of development, it is challenging to identify potential negative impacts that they might have on society. Typically, assessing these effects relies on experts, and while this is essential, there... See more

The home of the Utopian impulse was architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Painting can make us happy, but building is the art we live in; it is the social art par excellence, the carapace of political fantasy, the exoskeleton of one’s economic dreams. It is also the one art nobody can escape.

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

The relationship between utopia and futurescape is thus cardinal because the former serves to host scenarios of futures, while futurescapes are the projects that give consistency and form to utopias.

Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality.

Research has found that strategic foresight has a significant impact on an organisation’s bottom line – those who think about the future could be looking at up to 33% higher profitability and 200% higher market capitalisation within their industries.

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

competitive intelligence is about the here and now—capturing and analysing information about an organisation's external landscape, which includes the activities of customers, competitors, distributors, technological trends, and prevailing market conditions. It typically has its sights set on the immediate future, up to five years ahead. It also... See more

Unlike humans, AI can’t flexibly navigate changing environments yet because it does not have a notion of its “self” and what it can do with it.