Category Archives: Future

The Future of Futures

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A university in the United Kingdom recently asked its students to write essays on whether the future was open or closed — an open future being one where anything could happen, a closed future being where a single or fixed future had become inevitable.  Without exception the students all wrote essays about closed futures. 

But if there is one thing we can be certain of concerning the future, it is surely that it will always be uncertain. There must always be many ways in which the future could unfold or be amended.

We have been engaged as futurists for more than 30 years with the needs of businesses, governments, and non-profit organisations to grasp the nettle when it comes to the question of “What’s next?” and to investigate how future-proof is our organization to the cluster of change agents circling our operating environment.

Over this time, we have come to think of the future as a terra incognita, a landscape that some people may claim to have seen, but one where the terrain remains mostly unknown beyond some basic geographical and geological elements. The millions of people that will, as Oxford’s William MacAskill outlines in his breathtaking book What We Owe the Future, inhabit this cloud-covered land are also largely unknown, so we have an ethical responsibility to rehearse how we should behave towards them to optimize the outcomes both for them and ourselves.

But the more we have grappled with the uncertainties of the future it has become increasingly clear that the future only exists in the present.  Adapting Benedetto Croce’s aphorism about history, all futures are contemporary futures. They are not, after all, imagined destinations but rather complex world views through which we look at today. They are reflections of who we are, where we have been and where it is that we would like to travel next.

All futures are contemporary futures. They are not, after all, imagined destinations but rather complex world views through which we look at today. They are reflections of who we are, where we have been and where it is that we would like to travel next.

T. S. Eliot, like many artists (for example, where would modernist architecture be without Mondrian?), got there before us. In Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, he said:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
….
human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Cataloguing these world views is not hard provided we own up to what we are really doing. It is notable that we futurists are rarely employed to predict or forecast the future. Rather we are hired to either validate a journey that is already well underway or to fashion alternative futures or scenarios that flow logically from the contemporary present.

An Australian client interested in the future of primary industries, selected one future scenario from the four worlds we had created as a preferred future and set about using this “prediction” as the purpose of the scenario planning exercise. In other words, the future was an excuse to justify a pre-existing view of the future or perhaps to reassure everyone that everything would turn out alright.

In scenario work the most important building blocks are what we call the critical uncertainties shaping the external environment in which scenario-client organisations operate. Over the last 30 years, across 30 or so projects, the favored drivers of change we have encountered have been in areas such as China & Geopolitics, Climate Change & Environmental Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence & Technology, Generational & Social Change, Economics & Happiness – not forgetting Culture Arts, & Entertainment

Foresight is, inevitably, an indulgence. If you are on a sinking ship, which perhaps the university students thought they were, the exercise can be little more than distraction. The proverbial deckchairs onboard the Titanic.

But foresight remains an activity which encourages us to think in abstract ways – literally by conjuring up artefacts that have no independent existence from our emotions and intelligence. This is most evident in the field of macro-economics which has become the melting pot in which the forces driving the environment in which we live collide with each other. They create abstractions that we then use to validate public policies that seek to optimise outcomes for nations and the world.

Think of inflation, unemployment, GDP, aggregate demand/supply, and economic growth as just some of the key variables that governments slavishly rely upon to determine their fiscal and monetary policies. What do all these items have in common? Simply, it is that they do not exist. You can’t touch them or feel them.

Rather, they are abstractions reliant on the algorithmic values that are used to generate what data is collected and why – reliant on the underlying world views of those collecting the data.

For example, when you attempt to disentangle the mishmash of driving forces that create inflation, it becomes impossible to generate logical descriptions of future environments.  There is simply too much going on for the future to settle. This is perhaps the contemporary problem with futures and thus its future.

Perhaps Douglas Rushkoff was right, with all futures collapsing into a chaotic present.

After all, how can you engage people into thinking about unfamiliar futures when the recent past contains a reality TV star becoming the U.S. president, the UK waving goodbye to its European cousins, a virus inflicting infection upon the world, and a tank war in Europe that oscillates between the trenches of 1914 and the futuristic fantasies of  H G Wells.  Everything happens, everywhere, all at once. Unfathomable parallel universes simultaneously collapsing into a black hole from which the light of “it might be alright” cannot escape. 

No wonder Major Tom became a junkie (David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes) and no surprise that William Gibson, anticipating AI in his seminal cyber-punk novel Neuromancer, eventually gave up writing novels set in the future. The present is quite strange enough thank you very much. There is no bandwidth left to think beyond the present. Even the so-called news has become too much to bear. If it bleeds it leads, but if it calms our fears it disappears. Too much reality? Escape into a virtual insanity. At least you won’t be alone.

Our current engagement with AI similarly tells us a lot about the impossibility of the future. AI is more than a critical uncertainty with a range of potential futures. It is a basket of unknown unknowns whose systemic consequences are Black Swans beyond our comprehension.

Even death and taxes come to grief in an AI future funded by Tech Titans using the spoils of privacy invasion and algorithmic recommendation to fund massive rockets (Freud anyone?) and/or longevity research (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray perhaps?)

It is unsurprising then that we live in a world without a future. As a result, cultural attention and financial investment is moving to a compressed and accelerated present.  Two cultural phenomena support this point of view. The first is the rise of populism fuelled by social media, the second is AI.

We are living in a world where news – fake or otherwise – travels quickly and conversations based on providers like Tik Tok, Instagram and Twitter are interested only in the here and now, so much so that in many channels the uploaded content has a very short life before it disappears. The cycle of news is quickening and shortening every day. Here today and gone today.  

The second phenomenon is more one of social psychology. Mindfulness is the case in point. It teaches that preoccupation with what might become a deterministic tomorrow needs to be abandoned in place of a total non-judgmental preoccupation with the present.

As T.S. Eliot prompted the concepts of present and future worlds that are muddling and confused as well as steeped in uncertainty as to their origin.

He also cast doubt on the idea of the past, and would have endorsed Russian economist and politician Yavlinsky’s comments in a futures workshop in Provence some years back when he declared that for Russia the greatest level of uncertainty belonged to the past. How can we agree on our future if we can’t agree on our past”?  And anyway, the future is too far away to matter.

Maybe the students with closed minds are right after all?

No future indeed.

Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman. Extracted from Compass magazine, December 2023.

https://www.apf.org/apf-resources/compass

Everything I’ve Ever Learnt About The Future

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Here’s a prediction. You are reading this because you believe that it’s important to have a sense of what’s coming next.

Or perhaps you believe that since disruptive events are becoming more frequent you need more warning about potential game-changers, although at the same time you’re frustrated by the unstructured nature of futures thinking.

Foresight is usually defined as the act of seeing or looking forward – or to be in some way forewarned about future events. In the context of science, it can be interpreted as an awareness of the latest discoveries and where these may lead, while in business it’s generally connected with an ability to think through longer-term opportunities and risks be these technological, geopolitical, economic, or environmental.

But how does one use foresight? What practical tools are available for individuals to stay one step ahead and to deal with potential pivots?

The answer to this depends on your state of mind.

In short, if alongside an ability to focus on the here and now you have – or can develop – a culture that’s furiously curious, intellectually promiscuous, self-doubting, and meddlesome you are likely to be far more effective at foresight than if you doggedly stick to a single idea or worldview. This is because the future is rarely a logical extension of single ideas or conditions.

Furthermore, even when it looks as though this may be so, everything from totally unexpected events, feedback loops, behavioural change, pricing, taxation, and regulation have a habit of tripping up even the best-prepared plans.

Looking both ways

In other words, when it comes to the future most people aren’t really thinking, they are just being logical based on small sets of recent data or personal experience. The future is inherently unpredictable, but this gives us a clue as to how best to deal with it. If you accept – and how can you not – that the future is uncertain, then you must accept that there will always be numerous ways in which the future could play out. Developing a prudent, practical, pluralistic mind-set that’s not narrow, self-assured, fixated, or over-invested in any singular outcome or future is therefore a wise move.

This is similar in some respects to the scientific method, which seeks new knowledge based upon the formulation, testing, and subsequent modification of a hypothesis.

Not blindly accepting conventional wisdom, being questioning and self-critical, looking for opposing forces, seeking out disagreement and above all being open to disagreements and anomalies are all ways of ensuring agility and most of all resilience in what is becoming an increasingly febrile and inconstant world.

This is all much easier said than done, of course. Homo sapiens are a pattern seeing species and two of the things we loathe are randomness and uncertainty. We are therefore drawn to forceful personalities with apparent expertise who build narrative arcs from a subjective selection of so-called facts. Critically, such narratives can force linkages between events that are unrelated or ignore important factors.

Seeking singular drivers of change or maintaining a simple positive or negative attitude toward any new scientific, technological, economic, or political development is therefore easier than constantly looking for complex interactions or erecting a barrier of scepticism about ideas that almost everyone else appears to agree upon or accept without question.

Danger: hidden assumptions

In this context a systems approach to thinking can pay dividends. In a globalised, hyper-connected world, few things exist in isolation and one of the main reasons that long-term planning can go so spectacularly wrong is the oversimplification of complex systems and relationships.

Another major factor is assumption, especially the hidden assumptions about how industries or technologies will evolve or how individuals will behave in relation to new ideas or events. The hysteria about Peak Oil might be a case in point.  Putting to one side the natural assumption that we’ll need oil in the future, the amount of oil that’s available depends upon its price. If the price is high there’s more incentive to discover and extract more oil especially, as it turned out, shale oil.

A high oil price also fuels the search for alternative energy sources, but also incentivises behavioural change at both an individual and governmental level.  It’s not an equal and opposite reaction, but the dynamic tensions inherent within powerful forces means that balancing forces do often appear over time.

Thus, we should always think in terms of technology plus psychology, or one factor combined with others.  In this context, one should also consider wildcards. These are forces that appear out of nowhere or which blindside us because we’ve discounted their importance.

Similarly, it can often be useful to think in terms of future and past. History gives us clues about how people have behaved before and may behave again. Therefore, it’s often worth travelling backwards to explore the history of industries, products, or technologies before travelling forwards.

If hidden assumptions, the extrapolation of recent experience, and the interplay of multiple factors are three traps, cognitive biases are a fourth. The human brain is a marvellous thing, but too often tricks us into believing that something that’s personal or subjective is objective reality. For example, unless you are aware of confirmation bias it’s difficult to unmake your mind once it’s made up.

Once you have formed an idea about something – or someone – your conscious mind will seek out data to confirm your view, while your subconscious will block anything that contradicts it. This is why couples argue, why companies steadfastly refuse to evolve their strategy and why countries accidently go to war. Confirmation bias also explains why we persistently think that things we have experienced recently will continue.  Similar biases mean that we stick to strategies long after they should have been abandoned (loss aversion) or fail to see things that are hidden in plain sight (inattentional blindness).

In 2013, a study in the US called the Good Judgement Project asked 20,000 people to forecast a series of geopolitical events. One of their key findings was that an understanding of these natural biases produced better predictions. An understanding of probabilities was also shown to be of benefit as was working as part of a team where a broad range of options and opinions were discussed.

You must be aware of another bias – Group Think – in this context, but if you are aware of the power of consensus you can at least work to offset its negative aspects.

Being aware of how people relate to one another also recalls the thought that being a good forecaster doesn’t only mean being good at forecasts. Forecasts are no good unless someone is listening and is prepared to act.

Thinking about who is and who is not invested in certain outcomes – especially the status quo – can improve the odds when it comes to being heard. What you say is important, but so too is whom you speak to and how you illustrate your argument, especially in organisations that are more aligned to the world as it is than the world as it could become.

Steve Sasson, the Kodak engineer who invented the world’s first digital camera in 1975 showed his invention to Kodak’s management and their reaction allegedly was: ‘That’s cute, but don’t tell anyone.”  Eventually Kodak commissioned research, the conclusion of which was that digital photography could be disruptive.

However, it also said that Kodak would have a decade to prepare for any transition. This was all Kodak needed to hear to ignore it. It wasn’t digital photography per se that killed Kodak, but the emergence of photo-sharing and of group think that equated photography with printing, but the result was much the same.

Good forecasters are good at getting other peoples’ attention using narratives or visual representations. Just look at the power of science fiction, especially movies, versus that of white papers or power point presentations.

If the engineers at Kodak had persisted or had brought to life changing customer attitudes and behaviours using vivid storytelling – or perhaps photographs or film – things might have developed rather differently.

Find out what you don’t know.

Beyond thinking about your own thinking and thinking through whom you speak to and how you illustrate your argument, what else can you do to avoid being caught on the wrong side of history? According to Michael Laynor at Deloitte Research, strategy should begin with an assessment of what you don’t know, not with what you do. This is reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous ‘unknown unknowns’ speech.

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know….”

The language that’s used here is tortured, but it does fit with the viewpoint of several leading futurists including Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future. Saffo has argued that one of the key goals of forecasting is to map uncertainties.

What forecasting is about is uncovering hidden patterns and unexamined assumptions, which may signal significant revenue opportunities or threats in the future.

Hence the primary aim of forecasting is not to precisely predict, but to fully identify a range of possible outcomes, which includes elements and ideas that people haven’t previously known about, taken seriously or fully considered.

The most useful starter question in this context is: ‘What’s next?’ but forecasters must not stop there. They must also ask: ‘So what?’ and consider the full range of ‘What if?’

Consider the improbable

A key point here is to distinguish between what’s probable, and what’s possible. (See Introducing the 4Ps post).

Sherlock Holmes said that: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” This statement is applicable to forecasting because it is important to understand that improbability does not imply impossibility. Most scenarios about the future consider an expected or probable future and then move on to include other possible futures. But unless improbable futures are also considered significant opportunities or vulnerabilities will remain unseen.

This is all potentially moving us into the territory of risks rather than foresight, but both are connected. Foresight can be used to identify commercial opportunities, but it is equally applicable to due diligence or the hedging of risk. Unfortunately, this thought is lost on many corporations and governments who shy away from such long-term thinking or assume that new developments will follow a simple straight line.  What invariably happens though is that change tends to follow an S Curve and developments tend to change direction when counterforces inevitably emerge.

Knowing precisely when a trend will bend is almost impossible but keeping in mind that many will is itself useful knowledge.

The Hype Cycle developed by Gartner Research is also helpful in this respect because it helps us to separate recent developments or fads (the noise) from deeper or longer-term forces (the signal). The Gartner model links to another important point too, which is that because we often fail to see broad context, we tend to simplify.

This means that we ignore market inertia and consequently overestimate or hype the importance of events in the shorter term, whilst simultaneously underestimating their importance over much longer timespans.

An example of this tendency is the home computer. In the 1980s, most industry observers were forecasting a Personal Computer in every home. They were right, but this took much longer than expected and, more importantly, we are not using our home computers for word processing or to view CDs as predicted. Instead, we are carrying mobile computers everywhere, which is driving universal connectivity, the Internet of Things, smart sensors, big data, predictive analytics, which are in turn changing our homes, our cities, our minds and much else besides.

Drilling down into the bedrock to reveal the real why.

What else can you do to see the future early? One trick is to ask what’s behind recent developments. What are the deep technological, regulatory of behavioural drivers of change? But don’t stop there.

Dig down beyond the shifting sands of popular trends to uncover the hidden bedrock upon which new developments are being built. Then balance this out against the degree of associated uncertainty.

Other tips might include travelling to parts of the world that are in some way ahead technologically or socially. If you wish to study the trajectory of ageing, for instance, Japan is a good place to start. This is because Japan is the fastest ageing country on earth and consequently has been curious about robotics longer than most. Japan is already running out of humans and is looking to use robots to replace people in various roles ranging from kindergartens to aged care.

You can just read about such things, of course. New Scientist, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, The Economist Technology Quarterly are all ways to reduce your travel budget, but seeing things with your own eyes tends to be more effective. Speaking with early adopters (often, but not exclusively younger people) is useful too as is spending time with heavy or highly enthusiastic users of products and services.  

Academia is a useful laboratory for futures thinking too, as are the writings of some science fiction authors. And, of course, these two worlds can collide. It is perhaps no coincidence that the sci-fi author HG Wells studied science or that many of the most successful sci-fi writers, such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, have scientific backgrounds.

So, find out what’s going on within certain academic institutions, especially those focussed on science and technology, and familiarise yourself with the themes the best science-fiction writers are speculating about.

Will doing any or all these things allow you to see the future in any truly useful sense? The answer to this depends upon what it is that you are trying to achieve. If you aim is to get the future 100% correct, then you’ll be 100% disappointed. However, if you aim is to highlight possible directions and discuss potential drivers of change there’s a very good chance that you won’t be 100% wrong. Thinking about the distant future is inherently problematic, but if you spend enough time doing so it will almost certainly beat not thinking about the future at all.

Creating the time to peer at the distant horizon can result in something far more valuable than prediction too. Our inclination to relate discussions about the future to the present means that the more time we spend thinking about future the more we will think about whether what we are doing right now is correct. Perhaps this is the true value of forecasting: It allows us to see the present with greater clarity and precision.

Richard Watson April 2023. richard@nowandnext.com

Using past and present to predict the future

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I’ve long watched what people are watching on TV (nostalgia + dystopia), and at movies (safe sequels) to ponder emerging trends. I also keep an eye on what type of books are on the best-seller lists (cooking, monsters, travel, rebalancing) and even what slogans people have on their t-shirts (100% human), which can be especially useful to spot emerging weak signals.

However, over in Germany this idea has been made more rigorous. (Thanks to Aifric for spotting this btw).


Using novels to predict the future.

Future Shock at Fifty

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Here’s my chapter from the new book that’s just out looking back at Future Shock. The book, After Shock, can be bought here. US link here.

Future Shock @ 50.

One of the enduring issues futurists face is bad timing. Like science-fiction writers and technologists, futurists often believe that things will happen sooner rather than later. Future Shock, which accurately described the turmoil of the 1970s, is perhaps more accurate and relevant now than it was then. The book’s central idea, that the perception of too much change over too short a period of time would create instability, perfectly describes the volatility, uncertainty and confusion currently being created by geo-political events, climate change and technology, most of all digital technologies, that accelerate everything except our capacity to cope with change. Hence a global epidemic of anxiety that expresses itself in everything from the rise of mental illness to the mass prescription of painkillers and anti-depressants.

Looking backwards, it’s hard to imagine how the upheavals of the early 1970s could have be seen as shocking. Surely the pace of change then was glacial compared to what it is now? But we have largely forgotten about the seismic shift from ‘we’ to ‘me’ that accompanied the fading of the sixties and the blossoming of the seventies. Group love was replaced by empowered individualism. The invention of modern computing, which soon became personal computing, amplified the focus on the individual even further. Peace, too, was shattered, not only by the enduring war in Vietnam, but by the invention of international terrorism, while OPEC’s oil shock created inflation and economic uncertainty. Oh, and the US had a rogue President, which proves, to me at least, that some things do not change quite as much as we sometimes imagine.

Maybe the speed of change in the 70s wasn’t as rapid as today, but events back then were still alarming compared to the relative stability that had endured before. Global media made such events more visible too. Information Overload is idea championed in Future Shock and another that feels almost quaint when it’s used in the context of the 70s. Overloaded? Way back then? You cannot be serious.

The problem, of course, is that while many things did indeed change, and continue to do so today, we do not. Or, at least, we struggle to keep up. Edward O. Wilson, the American biologist, sums the situation up perfectly when he says that:

“Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world.

The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour.

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

This clash, between technologies and behaviours that change rapidly (exponential is a word that’s thrown around with careless abandon, but rarely stacks up outside computing) and our brains which do not change as fast was seen by the Toffler’s as being injurious to not only our health, but to our decision-making abilities too.

Interestingly, decades after Future Shock was written, a study published by Angelika Dimoka, Director of the Centre for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, appears to support part of what the book proposed.

This study found that as information is increased, so too is activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the human brain associated with decision-making and the control of emotions. Yet eventually, if incoming information continues to flow unrestrained, activity in this region falls off. The reason for this is that part of the brain has essentially left the building. When information reaches a tipping point, the brain protects itself by shutting down certain functions. Outcomes include a tendency for anxiety and stress levels to soar and for people to abstain from making important decisions. Not so much future shock as present paralysis, perhaps.

Future Shock did not propose a solution to this problem.

The book, as the authors pointed out, was always more of a diagnosis than a cure, although education is mentioned as a critically important factor going forward. So too is a need to guard against change that’s either unguided or unrestrained.

This, again, is very much where we stand today. Technologies such as autonomous trucks, surgical robots and battlefield drones are being developed with little or no public debate.

If Tesla, for example, were Boeing or Bristol-Myers Squibb, I find it hard to imagine how their products would be allowed anywhere near the public at such a stage of development. As for artificial intelligence, the situation is even worse.

Broad or General AI could be the best or the worst invention humankind will ever make and yet there is hardly any broad discussion about the risks, let alone any public debate about what this technology is ultimately for. Like many other things, AI is largely being imposed upon people for economic gain and it is hard to see why it will enhance rather than diminish our humanity overall. However, this pessimistic view ignores two things I’ve learned about the future, which is that the future is not linear and it’s not binary either. Things will happen that nobody, especially futurists, saw coming and the most likely scenario is an uneasy balance between people wishing to push forwards and others wanting to pull back.

So, fifty years on, is there now a cure for Future Shock?

I think there is and I believe that we are beginning to see some early signs of it.

In my view, the central problem at the moment is not change or acceleration per se, but that we have lost trust in government, science, business, the media and even each other. We’ve also simultaneously lost our anchor points and thrown away our ballast, with the result that we are being tossed about in a high sea without any sign of land to navigate towards. No wonder we are feeling disorientated and somewhat nauseous.

It is this lack of direction, more than anything else, that is fuelling our anxiety in my view. But a simple solution is at hand. First, we need a moderate level of disconnection.

We need to stop treating all information as power and reclaim some control over what enters our brains. The information universe is infinite, but our attention spans and mental processing capabilities are not. More importantly, without a strong sense of identity, in other words a sense of whom we are and where we stand, we will continue to be thrown around by the slightest disturbance.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that we ditch our cell-phones or throw out our televisions in the style of Peter Finch in the movie Network, more than we consider more carefully the ideas that we let into our homes and our brains.

One we have regained some sense of calm and perspective we then need to talk to each other about where it is that we want to go in the future. How do we want to live? Even the ‘fact’ that the future has arrived all at once, which some people cite as being a source for many of our troubles, would be easy to deal with if we only knew what destination we were heading towards. Then, as Future Shock suggests, we could restrain or reject anything that impedes our progress.

Having a view of what lies ahead, a shared vision of a promised land if you will, would also allow us to focus more on the present and worry less about endless unknowns. We should spend far less time individually worrying about what might happen and much more time collectively thinking about what it is that we want to happen.

There are echoes of this happening already in everything from the growing disenchantment with our political elites and Big Tech to the criticisms that are emerging concerning globalisation and the sterile nature of free-market economics and the inequality of wealth and opportunity that results.

In my opinion, the next big thing will be a seismic shift concerning what we value, which is us. All we are waiting for is a trigger. People can feel that something or someone is coming already, although nobody has expressed it yet.

It is the absence of a future, and especially a future where humanity matters, that is being felt, but I believe we are on the cusp of changing things in the right direction.

As Future Shock says, we need to humanize distant tomorrows and the best way of doing this is to take control of the future. Whether we like it or not, we are on the cusp of developing technologies that will give us godlike powers. The simple question is what to do with this power. Who do we, as individuals, societies and a species, want to be?

Alvin Toffler died in 2016, his wife and co-author in 2019, and I think we all owe them a great debt. Not only did they place future thinking firmly on the world’s stage, they established a literary genre that continues to this day.

Richard Watson is the author of Digital Vs. Human and the founder of nowandnext.com