prediction that works?

“as long as consumers don’t cotton on to the fact that the oil supply they depend on is in permanent decline and prudently decide to wean themselves off it, the crossover between supply and demand could trigger many lucrative years of high oil prices”
S. Shah, Crude: The Story of Oil, Allen and Unwin, Sydney (2005)
another quote from Richard Slaughter…
and [...]

The state of futures studies

Trying to take some stock of the state of futures studies – aside from the corporate and marketing trends stuff which often seems to pass as “futurist” these days. There’s an interesting critique of the old World Futures Society by Richard Slaughter in the latest Futures (Feb 2008, though it’s been online for [...]

Wells the discoverer

H.G. Wells famously grew more pessimistic as he grew older (see Mind at the End of Its Tether…).  He certainly started out optimistic about the possibility of foresight. Here he is looking down from the summit of Laplacean confidence in January 1902
“Until a scientific theory yields confident forecasts you know it is unsound and tentative. [...]

champion pessimists?

Apart from the people who believe in imminent global pandemic, I guess these guys are the ultimate pessimists in the energy debate…    www.dieoff.com
One may assume the site’s title is a prediction, rather than an instruction, I hope.

Colonising the future

I suppose they need to be professional pessimists, in some sense, but any historical look at futures studies quickly reminds one how much of the activity has been dictated and/or funded by the (mostly US) military and allied outfits.
The extent to which is still the case is well described in a post last year on [...]

middling optimism

Reviews of the future from the recent past are always instructive. Jonathan Margolis’ A Brief History of the Future (2000) is a breezy journalistic look at predictions of all kinds, though spends more time on gadgets, and sociology than global scenarios. He comes down in favour of a kind of qualified optimism, based [...]

When it changed

Studies of fiction yield an interesting take on when attitudes to the range of possible futures changed. Adam Roberts’ admirable history of science fiction locates the crucial period in the seventeenth century, and identifies the scientific revolution as the key stimulus.
“It is because of the opening up of a secular idiom for cosmological speculation in [...]

optimism (absence of)

There’s an interesting essay by Matthew Taylor in today’s New Statesman discussing why people may be relatively well-off individually, yet believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket - and some instructively pessimistic responses already…

memory and forgetting

Remembering the future.
Easy to see that when you contemplate the future, the past is all you really have to go on. So I was intrigued by a piece in Nature, a year or so ago now, suggesting that the way we build memories may be specifically tailored to allow efficient generation of situations yet [...]