Conversation

Good time to be a futurist. Since all old futures have been trashed there’s demand for building up a whole new set of futures. Most futurists will fail though since they were trained in adjacent possible variational futures, not blank-modes futures.
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The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there — L. P. Hartley Me: sub alien planet for foreign country
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This really is very challenging futurism problem. It’s hard to sort out the initial conditions of the future we’re in from the dead end causal lines of the extrapolated past that are inconsistent with post covid world. Cache invalidation is severe.
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Only about 10% of the present is seeds of the future. 90% is dead end stuff. Usually it’s the other way around
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Ok maybe it’s actually a terrible time to be a futurist. I think the basic toolkit may be trashed. Scenarios are a variational method for example. The only method I think is still robustly valid now is design fiction.
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Replying to
I’m 180 degrees opposite on this take. Design fiction was a hot house flower that could only thrive in the frictionlessness of the just-concluded era. Scenario planning which is all about looking cold-eyed at complex sets of bad trade-offs has the upper hand now.
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Hey design fiction is the artsy fartsy humanities side and scenario planning is the engineer’s and civic planner’s approach. You’d think I would pigeon hole myself the other way.
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I think you’re wrong. Scenarios accurately called this future but the one beyond is intractable for that approach past immediate covid projections because dimensionality is too high. Design fiction was just cute sci-fi generation parlor trick then but is real now.