Systems in which humans are ‘bearers’ of social relations possess features that make knowing and bringing about proposed futures exceptionally difficult.

Finally, it is almost impossible for social groups to anticipate exactly what will bring about appropriate system change, especially because of the ‘wickedness’ of problems. There are often no elegant solutions. While groups seek to innovate projects of change, it is hard to ensure that intended outcomes will occur.

Especially important here are long-term shifts in societies – what Fernand Braudel described as the ‘longue durée’ – counterposing these to a short-term focus upon events. Braudel talks of ‘history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man [sic] in relationship to his environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constan

He presents SF prototyping as an emergent tool within forecasting – a ‘prototype’ in this context is ‘a story or a fictional depiction of a product’ (Johnson 2011: 12). SF is not just a resource to draw upon for possible imaginings of future worlds, but also a technique for generating scenarios through developing characters, plots and narrative sto

Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future’ (quoted Mumford 1922: 22). Before the nineteenth century, the future was rarely understood as a very different place, as an undiscovered country.

Major turning points are what physicists term ‘phase transitions’, as when water turns into ice (Arthur 2013: 10–11; Nicolis 1995). This is ‘uncertainty’, not mere risk, and such transitions are enormously difficult to ‘predict’. Climate scientists debate whether a phase transition will occur if global temperatures increase by a few degrees over th

There is a non-linear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fires. Fifty-year-old trees burn fifty times more intensely than twenty-year-old trees. However, because of the power of influential residents living in the Malibu region, since 1919 the local policy has been one of ‘total fire suppression’. This means t

A few futures have been ‘good news’, a possible utopia.

This may be true, for example, of driverless cars, around which there is currently enormous excitement being generated by their developers but no clear sense of just what social practices they will enable.