Que sera, sera... or the future is now. Which is it?

Next Monday, 22nd February, I have the pleasure of hosting an event for the Royal Anthropological Institute. It's free and open to the public - via Zoom, of course - and you may want to join us if you're interested in how people think and talk about the future... or what makes robots and related technologies so dominant in our future perspectives... or why science fiction is coming to be seen as a form of knowledge, not just entertainment.

'Anthropology and/of the Future' (https://bit.ly/AnthroFuture) will feature two distinguished professors of anthropology and a science fiction writer. Professor Kathleen Richardson, author of 'An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines' and Professor Rebecca Bryant, co-author with Daniel M. Knight of 'The Anthropology of the Future' will be joined by Stephen Oram, whose books include 'Eating Robots' and 'Biohacked and Begging', volumes one and two respectively of the 'Nudge the Future' series.

Ideas of the future are culturally and historically specific. The prevalent idea today, certainly in the advanced industrialised economies, has roots in the works of late 19th and early 20th century authors like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Indeed, it was Wells who announced, in a 1913 Royal Institution lecture entitled 'The Discovery of the Future', the arrival of the 'modern' type of mind which, he claimed, "thinks constantly and by preference of things to come".

Since then, the idea that we can somehow know and experience the future now has taken hold. There were just two years between Doris Day singing "que sera, sera, whatever will be will be, the future's not ours to see" in 1956 and Robert Jungk publishing his celebrated 1958 study of the social and psychological impact of the atomic bomb - 'Tomorrow is Already Here'.

By the mid-1980s philosopher Jean Baudrillard had declared that it's no longer necessary to read science fiction because "we're already living it". In the 1990s science fiction writer William Gibson observed "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". I'm sure you have shared my experience, in the subsequent twenty or so years, of seeing variations on this theme appear in everything from children's cartoons to the titles of conferences held by every profession, trade body and academic discipline.

Just last week, this advert appeared in an email newsletter on innovation:

"A solar-powered autonomous drone scans for forest fires. A surgeon first operates on a digital heart before she picks up a scalpel. A global community bands together to print personal protection equipment to fight a pandemic.

'The future is now,' says Frédéric Vacher, head of innovation at Dassault Systèmes."

Is 'the future' really 'now'? If so, what does that mean for notions of time and temporality? What does it imply about human agency - our ability to influence or change what happens to us? These are important questions in the context of an ever-growing gap between our technological capabilities and our social and political institutions; a gap that Alvin Toffler famously identified as the root cause of 'Future Shock'.

Do join us if you can. It promises to be a fascinating conversation.