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

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

Uncertainty is our only certainty when it comes to AI and the future of work. This does not mean workers, busi -nesses, and the government have no options to prepare for that future. The most important step they can take is to promote and strengthen workers’ noncognitive skills to enhance their ability to adapt and persevere amid rapid change.

Particularly relevant to the idea of episodic simulation is the process of forming “implementation intentions” (Gollwitzer, 1999) which involve imagining and rehearsing a plan with reference to the specific future context in which it will be executed. Research has shown that creating implementation intentions significantly increases the likelihood... 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.

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.

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.

We do things to change the future, not the past