futuremastery blog

"What does not kill us makes us stronger." Nietzsche’s quote has always been seen as a triumph of will. Paradoxically, we often forget one key thing: we still have to avoid getting killed...

Civilizations, like humans, are mortal.

How many great names, once shining in the firmament, have now crumb...

Crises have this in common: millenarian theories thrive.

It's a natural tendency of the human mind—when faced with a troubled world, the fear of loss outweighs the will to win.

This sometimes sparks extreme social movements, as seen in periods of chaotic transition. We witnessed this during the fa...

"Do you know what time it is?"

Over the past few months, this meme has gained popularity in the US, particularly among Republican circles that decry the continuous erosion of the Western middle class’s standard of living, the decline of traditional values, and the rise of insecurity and chaos.

An ...

“If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Nearly 80 years after the publication of 1984, is the world so different from the one imagined by the writer, haunted by the threat of totalitarianism?

Admittedly, the comparison ...

Is there a meaning to history?

Can we discern recurring patterns over centuries, giving us a sense of the direction of things to come? More importantly, can we derive from these patterns insights into the threats and opportunities awaiting businesses and individuals, gaining practical guidance on h...

As history has shown, species that fail to adapt to changing conditions are ultimately wiped out. This raises an often unforeseen but implacable question: Is a new evolutionary holocaust coming with the impending global transition crisis?

In the Permian extinction event 250 million years ago, nearl...

How far is the future?

As sci-fi writer William Gibson coined decades ago: "It is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

We see it every day: from next-generation humanoid robots to CRISPR-engineered synthetic life creations and sentient artificial intelligence nearly waking up, w...

Innovation has a bright side. It also has a dark one, like the two-faced Janus divinity, the god of duality, of beginnings and ends, of creation and destruction.

Where do its flaws lie? Rarely in the technology itself. More frequently in the applications we make of it. But also in our own capacitie...

How will we live tomorrow?

Thinkers have always dreamed of foreseeing human life in the decades to come. Comparing the predictions of past futurists to what actually transpired, we must recognize that this is often a perilous exercise...

Our foresight tends to be a simple linear projection of the ...

Will the world go bust or recover in 2023?

As the adage says, futurists exist to help astrologers look serious…

At each year’s eve, analysts and institutions compete to share their predictions for the coming times. Quite a perilous exercise that often results in mixed outcomes, as we highlighted i...

Troubled times are periods of anguish and despair. Sometimes, they are also periods of miracles. A moment when the pressure of circumstances helps us to achieve things that we could not have imagined doing in normal times. When the impossible suddenly becomes possible

Indeed, we live in troubled ti...

Threats of epidemics, climate changes, energy crisis, economic recession, war: when we look at TV news shows each day, headlines are far from reassuring....

And, as we highlighted in previous posts, the prospects are not more reassuring. As if we were collectively heading to catastrophes. On the sw...

Humanity has had a dream for millennia: what if we could master our fate?

What if we could achieve the ambition of magicians, prophets, and scientists to be able to predict the future and take control of our destiny?

With all the unanswered questions arising:

• What would remain of free will?
...