What does a futurist do?
Look for signs of the future.There are many different ways of doing this, we mostly call it environmental scanning, trend, or horizon scanning—using all the information available to us, which is a lot, these days. You’ll need curiosity and a wide range of interests.The most interesting signs are early warnings or faint signals of what might happen in the future. The stuff in the trend reports is usually old (to us) or specially curated for the market in timely information.As a result of doing this every day, most futurists have a large informal database on the future in their heads, or online. This they use in their work, perhaps as speakers, internal futurists in a business, with clients, or as academics. You use what skills you’ve developed, speaking, writing, consulting, making videos, etc., to deliver what you learn to a wider world.There are no actual prerequisites to call yourself a futurist, but you would be wise to learn how, either on the job, working with an established futurist, or taking a certificate course, or if you have the time and interest, a graduate degree in the field. These would give you the basic structure of the job and after that you develop your own ways of working. We’ve all had to invent how to think about the future and, as a result, it has increased the creativity of the field.Good luck!
Futurists: 20 years from now, what will be the experience of renting cars?
Based on the current state of development of self-driving cars, I would predict that in 20 years almost all cars on U.S. roads are self-driving. As a result, these cars do not need to be manually parked and they can be called "on-demand" from the pool of available cars within a matter of seconds or minutes. Consequently, I would predict that we can "rent cars" by a push of a button (or whatever interface we'd use at that point), after which one of the available cars from the pool shows up at your GPS location within seconds or minutes. After finishing your trip, you will return the car to the resource pool for someone else to rent. This is simply accomplished by stepping out of the car and closing the door.This car utility pool would be managed and operated by a third party marketplace company, or an asset based "car rental" company that also owns many of the vehicles. I would predict that private car ownership goes down under this scenario and most of the cars will be owned by specialized companies.
What is the relationship between philosophy and futurism? How can philosophy help us understand and predict future knowledge?
Until recently the major philosophical tools were:Causal inference (Aristotle).Critical inquiry (originally Socrates).The Education System (Plato and Aristitle).Venn diagrams.Modern logical methods based on Aristotle and mathematics.Kripke’s notion of elemental conditionality.Metaphysical theories.Lewis’s notion of Many World’s Theory.Informal tools such as organization of concepts.And many other things like this.…Early philosophers such as Thales and Xenophanes did engage in crop prediction activities and business schemes, but it was somewhat on the side from their philisophical activities. It was sort of like well, such-and-such always happens so many moons after such and such unless there is a dry climate. Elementary stuff.…When psychology came along it was taken to be a major predictor tool that might impact the humanities.…Mathamatics was the most popular form of predictor, because of its role in economics, physics, chemistry, and even biological processes like thirst, consumption, and waste.…Around 2011 Alan Hajek finally introduced the concept of Philosophical Heuristics, which in his case were like rules of thumb that can help philosophers and even help people more broadly.Inspired by Hajek, as a result of my Coherent Systems project, I thought about what the most useful philosophical tools were, and how to implement them. However, these would benefit considerably by being coupled with a standard A.I. that makes more traditional predictions.Programmable HeuristicsPredicting questions.Objective knowledge.General solution to paradoxes and problems.Psychic prediction techniques.Formula for the souls of information.Formula for creativity.There is also a formula based on this for making predictions about innovation: Will AI help us develop technologies faster?
What prediction made by a futurist, such as Ray Kurzweil, makes you most nervous about the future?
When Ray Kurzweil started talking about unloading one’s consciousness and living forever… the sheer impossibility and audacity to stand up and claim such poppycock to be in our near future AND the general tech and general population accepted the idea gave me grave doubts about the nature of Sentience and Intelligence of our species. This is so gullible, such an unexamined impossible statement I can’t comprehend others don’t laugh in Kurzweil’s face.I’m scared that people have lost the ability to separate fact from fiction when discussing current technology, much less tech of next week or next year.
I have a lot of great wild far futuristic technology starup ideas how can I find people to hire?
Are You Sure About This?Altough maybe you had a lot of great ideas, starting and maintaining a startup is’nt easy. there are lots of both Succeeding Startups and failing ones.But to answer your question, start with your closest friends who shares the same ideal as you, and once you done that you can recruit people using direct ads, or from mouth-to-mouth. But my suggestion if you havent any experience with recruiting go hire your friends, at least you know them before.