What's Right with the Future

The future is one of the most unique and important developments to ever emerge from the human mind. In many respects, our ability to contemplate what lies ahead can be viewed as one of the primary drivers of our rapid transformation from unexceptional primate to becoming the globe-spanning, technology-wielding species that we are today. We literally owe our existence to this highly abstract concept and the ways it has influenced our journey these past four million years. It's an important idea that I will be exploring and expanding on in subsequent posts.

But the future has taken something of a beating in recent years. The idea that it is crucial, consequential, or heaven forbid, beneficial to our well being has fallen out of favor for a great many people. Today, many see the future representing not just change, but inevitably negative change. The loss of the environment, of personal power, of diminished relations and social fragmentation stand as proof for them that the future is not a good thing. For many, the future has come to represent anything but better days.

As someone who’s studied the future extensively, and like most of you reading this, experienced it for decades, I've seen these patterns before. Unfortunately, it's a perspective that causes many people to turn away from thinking too much about what lies ahead. It’s a disempowering response that works to their disadvantage, not to mention everyone else's.

Which is why I'm starting this column in the hope of shifting things a little. Finding a good title hasn't been easy because while I want these posts to have a positive slant, I really don't want to be Pollyannish either. There are already too many advocates and evangelists rah-rahing the latest iterative software development or business model or technology framework. But while we do need to question and push back on some of this, I also want to help find a balance, a positive perspective, not just on what the future is and represents, but what it can become. What we can become.

The world around us is troubled, challenged, and unstable, but it's also filled with opportunity, love, and hope. We face challenges unlike anything our ancestors ever faced, but the reverse can be said as well. The world we've built over these uncounted millennia affords us safety, security, stability, and comforts that would have been unimaginable to our forebears. We can thank the power of the future for making that possible.

In coming posts, I'll explore social trends, emerging technologies, human behaviors, machine biases, institutional failings, moonshot projects and much more. And of course, the very nature of the future itself. There's so much we all need to learn, to question and challenge as we look to the times ahead. The world of tomorrow doesn't build itself and none of us goes it alone. It is the result of the myriad choices and decisions we all make along the way. That’s what we've always done as we’ve gone about discovering what's right with the future.