By Jim Dator
While all humans are futurists (just as all humans are also historians, doctors, teachers, fighters, lovers.....), futures studies as it exists now had its origins just before World War II, and most clearly immediately after, with the publication of nonfiction articles and books, as well as conferences and institutions, devoted to the study and invention of futures (actually, of images of futures) of institutions, environments, processes, and values of worlds to come.
While some focused on certain images with scientific dispassion, others devoted their time and talent to imagining and endeavoring to create preferred futures — better worlds than those which exist now (though they might be thought to have existed in earlier times and places). While some dispassionately scientific images were proclaimed to be technological hellholes by some critics, other intriguing flights of fancy were deemed ridiculous or dangerous.
The World Futures Studies Federation was specifically created to provide a safeharbor for discussions about the futures by persons from communist, capitalist, and “Third World” countries. Amazingly, somehow most proponents and critics managed to attend the same conferences, publish in the same journals, and work with the same clients, for a while. But, just as with many other human endeavors since the 1980s, futures began to split into non-interacting groups, reflecting whatever the identity issues of the day might be — ethnicity, nationality, globality, gender, class, religion, ideology....
In the United States, certain early futures organizations took increasingly “conservative” positions — Toffler Associates, the Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation (most spectacularly), for example, while others, such as the Institute for Alternative Futures, supported aspirational positions typically considered to be “progressive.” There is little doubt that the conservative futures groups were far more successful than the progressive ones, if which policies and actions were adopted by major institutions is taken as an indicator of success.
Chris Broad addresses the Big Question: “Is democracy essential for professional futurists and strategic foresight professionals in developing their work? Can futurists thrive in a world dominated by fascism?” Years ago, I argued that while the futures theories and methods used by diverse groups might vary — showing how conservative, progressive, feminist, Green, authoritarian and other organizations might ground and do futures research — systematic anticipation per se was vital for the success of any organization regardless of its preferred futures. Nonetheless, I myself refused to do some kinds of futures work. For example, certain law firms only allowed the senior partners to participate in futures visioning activities, while I thought everyone who had a stake in the firm, from the chairs, partners and clients to the secretaries, janitors, and parking attendants should participate fully and equally. Foresight should not be secret knowledge — though of course colonizing the future via proprietary processes is the point of futures work for many organizations.
Nonetheless, for the most part, organizations such as the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), Futuribles, and even the World Future Society (WFS), and counterparts around the world, welcomed and embraced a wide variety of future-oriented identity/ideological groups within them. Their meetings were circuses with far more than three rings, meeting under very wide and spacious tents. Pink elephants waltzed together uninhibitedly with unicorns and microvita. There is no doubt in my mind that Thays Prado and Dr. Catherine Wilkins are correct in insisting that futurists should persist in “embracing conflict for the co-creation of transformative futures” — embracing, welcoming but not fostering conflict; being very, very careful about purposely designing and using technology to “disrupt” a situation that is dangerously disruptive already.
The Big Questions posed and answered in this issue of Compass reflect this applaudable reality, I am pleased to see. Richard Slaughter, a longtime, distinguished futurist, and former president of the World Futures Studies Federation, makes it abundantly clear from his point of view that the serious intractable big questions of the present are due to our uncritical adoption of industrial and post-industrial, high tech hardware, software, and orgware. He adds that the powerful technologies appeared without warning, and both disrupted established ways of life and caused new dangers and challenges.
If they indeed appeared without warning, then shame on us, since the primary duty of futurists is to identify emerging issues while there is still time to thwart or guide their development. These emerging issues (in my terminology) are what Elina Hiltunen calls “the small things.” It has long been my contention that futurists qua futurists should focus primarily on emerging issues, and not on established trends, and certainly not on current events. But by definition, emerging issues are things that most people donʻt see or know about, so when a futurist does suggest their importance, they tend to be ridiculed and rejected — thus establishing Datorʻs Second Law of the Futures.
However, the tragedy is that even if warned, there is no systemic way to use anticipatory knowledge. Once upon a time, the United States established an Office of Technology Assessment so that Congress could pass legislation to guide the introduction of new technologies appropriately. However, about the time technological assessment was becoming an effective tool, the OTA was killed because it was in danger of becoming effective in delaying the sudden introduction of innovations. The designers, manufacturers, and sellers of the technologies would not allow that. This led me to understand that the real revolutionaries in our world are not people striving to overthrow societies by violence and killing, but are the researchers, developers, producers, sellers, and users of disruptive technologies — and that all technologies are disruptive (Jim Dator, John Sweeney, and Aubrey Yee, Mutative Media, Springer, 2015). Indeed, technological change (broadly defined) has been a major driver of social and environmental change since homosapiens, sapiens emerged at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, continuing apace now (Jim Dator, Beyond identities: Human becomings in weirding worlds. Springer, 2022; Jim Dator, Living Make-Belief: Thriving in a Dream Society, Springer, 2024).
There was no outcry against the death of OTA by “the people” because “the people” were largely unaware of futures studies and its utility in enabling humanity to guide itself, carefully and democratically, towards preferred futures. Alvin Toffler introduced the concept of “Anticipatory Democracy” — futures-oriented participatory democracy —from the very beginning (Future Shock, Random House, 1970, pp. 416-430). I noted that an effective anticipatory democracy required four things that didnʻt exist yet —futures-oriented citizens, futures-oriented decision-makers, organized futures research, and futures-oriented structures of governance and economics.
Foundational to all of this were futures-oriented educational content and processes (including families and childrearing practices and rituals, as Riane Eisler points out in her vision of “a more equitable, peaceful, sustainable world”) so that humans could learn how to be futures-oriented and then are structurally enabled to behave in ways mindful (as Oikonen puts it) of our obligations to future generations. Sadly, the Big Question articles by Rosa Alegria, Terry Grim, Yuna Lee, and JT Mudge suggest to me that we are as far away from having fulfilled any of those “needs” as we were 55 years ago when they were first identified.
Indeed, in spite of the fact that a few words and techniques derived from futures studies have entered popular discourse, human actions have essentially driven us farther away from preferred futures and closer to catastrophe if not apocalyptic collapse.
So what can we do about it?
Sean Pillot de Chenecey considers the role of foresight for innovators. I urge some caution. New social inventions are needed, but they should seek to heal and enable. Not many should be purposely disruptive. Similarly, while we need leadership —widespread and exercised by “everyone” — we need far fewer “leaders” in positions of power, wealth, and privilege who make decisions that disrupt others while further securing, enriching and empowering themselves.
The place of ethics presents a major conundrum because new technologies enable new behaviors that challenge old values and behaviors that are based on old technologies. So how can we use old values to guide decisions about new technologies before they are actually used? I have abandoned the (probably hubristic) notion that we can actually create preferred futures “for everyone,” or naturally sustainable for anyone. What we can do is to learn to surf the existing and oncoming tsunami of change. It is too late to stop them — we might have been successful if we had begun 60 years ago — it is foolhardy to deny them and keep on trucking; and we are pitiful blind mole-rats indeed if we continue to trot on the treadmill to oblivion on which we currently revolve.
The recent Paris Olympics showed us a way. Surfing competition took place in a beautiful outpost of the French empire, Teahupo'o, Tahiti, where the waves are not only magnificently well-formed typically, but also horrifyingly big and dangerous. They were ominously huge when the Games began, well beyond what most contestants preferred to surf. As I write now, at the end of the competition when medals need to be awarded, the waves are pitifully small — almost impossible to surf.
But the games must go on, and the contestants must surf the waves that exist, and not the waves they prefer. No doubt nice, tubular artificial preferred waves could have been manufactured in Disneyland, Paris, but real, unpredictable waves in Teahupoʻo were assigned instead.
Similarly, our challenge is to learn how to surf the sets of political, cultural, environmental, economic and other waves rushing towards us, and stop whining, complaining, and wishing they were different.
How can your client “succeed” (and what does “success” mean) in the present and emerging futures?
How can your community thrive by eagerly embracing and adapting to perpetual sea-level rise, unprecedented heat, astounding artificial intelligence?
Stop being narrow-minded and prejudiced: Why not be the first in your neighborhood to become a cyborg and marry an artilect? Always with an eye out for “Whatʻs next” and an eagerness and ability to surf the next set of waves before they arrive.
I have thoughts about space exploration and settlement, that Krittika Sharma poignantly discusses, and of AI in relation to all life and not just futurists that Jaqueline Weigel, Delma Moraes, Vitor Raposo, Alexandre Contar Fernandes, and Elzi Campos present so well, but they will have to wait for another time.
James Allen (Jim) Dator is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa; Core Lecturer, Space Humanities, International Space University, Strasbourg, France; Adjunct Professor, Graduate School of Futures Strategy, Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Daejeon, Korea, and former President, World Futures Studies Federation. He also taught at Rikkyo University (Tokyo, for six years), the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, the University of Toronto, and the InterUniversity Consortium for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia.
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