Links tagged with “futurology”
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Station Identification – Petafloptimism
A good turn of the wheel for the brain from Kim Stanley Robinson: “one must be anti-anti-utopian”.
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E.W.Dijkstra Archive: The strengths of the academic enterprise (EWD 1175)
“The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans.” (via FaveJet)
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Scenario Magazine
“The magazine about tomorrow – made in collaboration with writers, thinkers, & artists from around the globe.” Quarterly. hadn’t heard of this. (via Ask MetaFilter)
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Top 20 most impactful Foresight & Futures Studies publications in the last 20 years – Rafael Popper’s Blog
All since I studied it. (via Houston Futures)
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Setting up a horizon scanning system | Hinesight….for Foresight
Andy Hines on setting one up for the US Forest Service.
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Look for the Lungfish
Some great paragraphs from a good post by Charlie Stross about questioning all assumptions when imagining what our future is like.
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Speculating Futures
A reading list. “Speculating Futures looks at past speculative narratives, like those of Ursula K. Le Guin, and past attempts at creating technological utopia, like Chile’s Cybersyn.”
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The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release
Brilliant transcript of a talk by Audrey Watters on predictions about the future of technology, what they mean, why they’re wrong, etc. Very good. (via Russell Davies)
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Tom Vanderbilt Explains Why We Could Predict Self-Driving Cars, But Not Women in the Workplace
We think technology will change much quicker than it does, “but when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same.” Lots of good stuff.
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The Future Is A Confidence Trick
“The industry of futurism is bad at the future.”
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HM Government Horizon Scanning Programme - Social Attitudes of Young People
“The aim of this report is to assess if and how social attitudes of young people in the UK today differ from previous generations, and how they might evolve in the future.” December 2014
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Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
In Cambridge, UK, horizon scanning for high impact, low probability events. (via the Guardian)
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I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
One thing learned from writing 3000 Motley Fool columns: “I’ve learned that short-term thinking is at the root of most of our problems, whether it’s in business, politics, investing, or work.” One for the futurists there. (via Kottke)
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After You’ve Gone by Thomas Nagel | The New York Review of Books
On thinking about the world after we, as individuals, die. And the importance of “the collective afterlife”, “the survival and continued renewal of humanity after our personal death”. (Subscribers only)
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Why People Really Love Technology: An Interview with Genevieve Bell - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic
Very interesting interview with the Intel researcher. Some good bits on demographics of the internet; fear (or not) of robots; physical vs digital; tactility; fear of the TV red button. (via @annegalloway)
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Foresight and Futures Studies Graduate Programs - Global List
I didn’t know there were so many these days.
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Teaching about the Future: Amazon.co.uk: Dr Peter C Bishop, Andy Hines: Books
New, expensive, book from my old futures professor and an alumni who now also teaches at Houston.
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Ten Rules for Creating Awful Scenarios
Good (bad) tips from Jamais Cascio
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Timeline of the far future - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Starts in 10,000 years time and goes on from there. (via Dan Hon)
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Open the Future: The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be
About how so much futurism is about technological change, but how that tech change is very incremental and not as interesting as the bigger, messier societal changes. Yes. (via BERG)
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Imperica - The future of the future
Leila Johnston and Chris Heathcote discuss (in text) visions of the future, and advertising’s representation of the future.
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Futurist-blogs.xls
A spreadsheet of blogs about the future. (via Houston Futures)
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Optimistontour.com - Pragmatic Idealism for the future
‘An Optimist’s Tour of the Future’ sounds like an interesting book. Today’s future needs more optimism. (via @thestory2011)
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Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
Brilliant stuff, and an amazing discovery. Why did that civilisation die out so suddenly?
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The Technium: 1,000 Years of Forgetting
I often think how even the most famous people alive today won’t be remembered in the distant future. But more importantly… A BRILLIANT video from the year 3000!
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BLDGBLOG: One Million Years of Isolation: An Interview with Abraham Van Luik
On planning nuclear waste disposal, designed to be stable and safe for one million years. Longest-term futures work ever?
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This is going into my “best ever” box of forum threads (Philosophistry)
Great future-y thought experiment: “So many of our grandparents were racist, and some of out parents are homophobes. Which of our own closely held beliefs will our own children and grandchildren by appalled by?” (via Danhon)
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Wrong Tomorrow - pundits vs. time
A fabulous way to record what predictions pundits make and keep track of how often they’re wrong (or right; you never know).
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Global Futures Studies & Research by the MILLENNIUM PROJECT
“Functions under the auspices of the World Federation of UN Associations.”
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Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future. | The Institute For The Future
“The world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game.” Interesting. There’s either a lot more futures stuff around at the moment, or I’m just stumbling across more of it. (via Wonderland)
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Rule Forty Two - » Welcome to the Future
Scroll some way through for evaluations of how futurists’ predictions turned out. (Although the futurists I know never called them “predictions” because we know they’re never 100% correct.) (via Boing Boing)
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Foundation for the Future
“Was established with the mission to increase and diffuse knowledge concerning the long-term future of humanity.” Less long-term than Long Now is, but perhaps more focused?
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Houston Futures Home - Houston Futures
A new unofficial student / staff / alumni-generated wiki about the Future Studies course I did in Houston.
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Conceptual Trends and Current Topics - Unthinkable Futures
I like this kind of “thinking the unthinkable” as a way to come up with new ideas about what the future could be. So easy to get stuck thinking about the most likely outcomes otherwise.
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Has Futurism Failed?
Good long summary of the history of futurism (not the art movement) and the state of the industry now. (via Blackbeltjones)
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TIME.com Print Page: TIME Magazine — The Road Ahead
A handful of celebs-in-the-weblog-world talk about the future. (via Kottke)
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Wired News: The Future Needs Futurists
On the need for professionalising futurism. (via Annie)