Our purpose
We are living through a technological revolution every bit as fundamental, liberating and dislocating as the industrial revolution of the 1800s and the Neolithic agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. We are living through a period of technological change and global spread of technologies that will alter every human institution and change our relationships with ourselves, each other, with government and between countries and governments.
Our consumption and the production and resources necessary to sustain it are changing our world and our planet – the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ – in unprecedented ways. Our resources and the natural world are under enormous strain; threats to peace between peoples, countries and civilisations are ever-present.
Technologies are changing who we are, how we think of ourselves individually and socially and how we relate to each other and to other groups of people elsewhere; technologies are changing and those changes are changing everything.
Futuresphere examines
- the forces shaping our changing world
- how the world is changing
- the effects of that change on people and institutions
- what the world of the future will look like, and
- what we need to do now to prepare for that world.
It looks at society, private and social organisations and institutions; it reflects on government policies and private decisions; it examines the local through to the global. It seeks to understand what the past and the present can tell us about the future.
The ‘future’ here is referring not to the immediate, predictable future in which we can understand probable outcomes by extrapolating from the present; it refers to periods from when uncertainties begin to dominate our ability to forecast or when assumptions, rather than observable reality, drive the outcomes of forecasts.
To chart a successful course through this uncertainty and the turbulence and change of the impacts of emerging technologies, we must
- identify the changing technologies
- understand the changes the technology will allow or impose and
- assess the individual and combined impacts of the changes on people, institutions, societies, our ways of life and the planet.
That is the role of Futuresphere.
To do this, we will focus around research themes covering key issues we must address in relation to changing and emerging technologies and their impact on our lives and world.