There might be a tendency to think of futurists as either “pie in the sky” utopians or “death from above” doomsayers. Or maybe just crackpots who make predictions that seem about as plausible as stories in the National Enquirer. Futurism can take all of those forms, or can just be a tool to make a cool sci-fi book or movie. However, serious futurists do have an important task and real methods. These methods are about as exacting and dependable for prediction as those in political science, large population sociology, or macro-economics. Not exact and not always dependable, for sure. That is, futurism is more like quantum than Newtonian physics. Maybe not even that dependable.
However, like quantum mechanics, there is a degree of indeterminancy. Futurists cannot predict exactly when the next generation of computers will come out, what the next microchips will be made of, or how. But futurists do one indelibly important task – they track general trends. When all other sciences and humanities are concerned either only with the past or present, futurism generalizes the past into studiable trends, and extrapolates them into a probable future. Trends studied include: computing power, global communication, global warming, population, and scientific/technological innovation.
Taking the general extrapolations as a starting point, futurists then *gasp* imagine what the future might mean (I would argue the best theorists, philosophers, and prognosticators always, and necessarily, use imagination). This imagining is neither precise nor singular. The futurist community, instead, thinks of several scenarios for the future (e.g. some insist on singularity soon, some don’t; some insist the singularity will be awful, some think it will be great, and some think it will just be “different”). This dialogue, no matter how fantastic it might get, is necessary. The best way to combat problems and find solutions is if we’ve already been talking about that problem for years. The more we talk about the future of ethics, technological utility, and every-day life, the more we will be at least mentally prepared for whatever might come our way.
More on Futurism:
Ray Kurzweil
Seminars About Longterm Thinking
Posted by rkschoon 