What is the Future?

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

Such specialists included prophets, diviners, seers, oracles, witches, technologists, sages, astrologers, clairvoyants, novelists, wizards, futurologists, fortune tellers and so on. These specialists often drew upon specific bodies of ‘expert’ knowledge, often a mix of the spiritual and secular.

Geels and Smit term such new technological niches as ‘hopeful monstrosities’ (2000: 879–80). Technology innovators often hype the possibilities of the new as representing unambiguous ‘progress’ in order to attract attention, and especially funding, for what is often a rather limited system in the initial stage. The

Edmund Burke argued that a society should be seen as a: ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (Burke [1790] quoted in Beinhocker 2006: 454). Burke points to the interests of unborn members of a society and how they need a powerful ‘voice’ to counter so

The future may present a promissory note that helps to transform the present in the direction of progress

‘The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones’ (1936: viii).

is only if a potential innovation comes to be successfully inserted within specific social practices that it will become core as people's lives get reorganized around it. Innovations thus presuppose transformations in underlying social practices. New practices can be difficult to engender by hierarchical policy imposition or by commercial advertisi

This corporate world generates a kind of digital utopianism (Turner 2006). Lanier argues how this reflects the general corporate takeover of much of the world, especially since the growth of neo-liberal discourse and practice from around 1980, first within the US and Britain and then throughout much of the world (Klein 2007).

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.