Futur-ish

It's all just a little bit too much. With Tobias running headlong into a thesis submission in September it's time to take a summer break and come back even stronger.

Only Radha could find the glorious spectacle of space flight ‘meh.’ Luckily for Tobias, I write these blurbs. Artemis II went round the moon and back and only one year off plan. Is this the kick-off for a new space race? If it is, it’s a very different flavour than the last one. Gone are the cultural politics preceding the ‘end of history.’ This race is all about who gets to set the terms of the c...

If you expected four leading foresight professionals to come and deliver a grab-bag of incredible intel, you are sorely mistaken. Instead we’re joined by Dr. Bree Trevena and Charlie Warwick to talk about recent reflections on what it means to be a ‘good’ futurist in the time of systemic complexity, fracturing identities and AI.  Links: Perspective A ‘Kill Switch’ Could Shutter Europe’s Access to...

There’s been a fair amount of coverage of maritime activities at Futur-ish and we’re pleased to bring you another episode where Radha was triggered by being targeted for luxury cruises. It seems hoteliers are pivoting from the land to the sea as insurance and sea levels rise to meet the warming climate. However, this is all triggering a doom loop where the increase in tourism to endangered places...

As we’ve documented before (see; Kessler Syndrome), the infrastructures we rely on and take for granted are increasingly crumbling and under threat. Cue a surge of investment and interest in alternatives to the systems that have shaped the global economy for the last few decades. It’s something we talk about all the time, throwing at the end of decks and workshops as a ‘things might get weird’ mom...

How much would you pay to be bored? Well, for the kids of Amsterdam it’s about 7 bucks to have their phones locked up and sit and read or do crosswords. Sure, you could just do this anyway without the fee but then would you really feel like you’re part of something, part of a movement?  This week, we’re joined by Tracee Worley to talk about her work in experiential and analog futures and chew over...

While it’s generally agreed that the global population is continuing to expand (at least until flatlining at the end of the century) for some parts of the world it is falling dangerously precipitously with the potential for severe economic and security impacts.  For the wealthy elite of Silicon Valley, this is an ideological failing, one that their blogs and op-eds are ready to tackle with shady c...

While you were counting down to 2026 on New Years, Tobias was counting down the last seconds of a future he very personally dreamed of; a future with less cars. You see, Zipcar, the UK’s biggest car sharing company were going out of business, ceasing operations for 2026.  Almost simultaneously, the UK government accelerated the timeline on autonomous vehicle trials. Before we know it, LA’s Waymos...

All over the world, healthcare systems are straining under the weight of ageing populations, crippling costs and overheads and new and novel conditions exacerbated by the biodiversity crisis.  A spate of new gadgets promises to give us more control over our health but if the social problems that underpin failing healthcare aren’t solved, how much can they do? Could we instead use seismic sensors i...

There’s been enough warning from fiction and indeed reality that people should really know better than to reduce the horror of conflict to gaming, petty bets and the chaos of chance. But perhaps ‘leaders’ really do think the gods play dice and now, as global institutions become increasingly unreliable, they want in. Things look pretty ‘yucky’ if you, for instance, respect the dignity of human life...

Somewhere, in a Trump administration office, someone decided that architects aren’t all that and now they’re being de-professionalised and removed from public debate. At the same time, more and more research is telling us that architecture happens inside your head and we need to design that way.  But what does this have to do with World War 2 battleships and the state of education? Radha thinks th...

Futur-ish are taking a short hiatus from our bi-weekly release schedule for the holiday. We’ll be back in 2026!

The sun has been the biggest tech success story of the last quarter century. Solar panels are cheaper than fences, efficiency just keeps going up and people are installing them at rates that consistently exceed projections.  A bottomless brunch of free photons might sound like the perfect gift, and for some, it is. However, for 250 years, we’ve built energy systems and grids around the core concep...

It used to be that the plastic blocks most teens might be interested in were multicoloured and used for stacking on top of each other. Now they’re transparent and vaguely-phone shaped, designed as addiction aids and symbols of protest.  Add in to this the growing popularity of Luddite movements across university campuses and charities, signals of democratic legislation banning phones and a prolife...

The future comes at you at unexpected ways. If the bullish pronouncements of tech bros are to believed it’s in the gadgets, gizmos and gimmicks dominating our feeds. Meanwhile, the future is coming fast for a tiny town in the middle of England. Flooding comes at a terrible cost but what are we willing to pay? As the water reaches up to swallow Middle England, more and more places with hundreds of...

The next time you’re desperately casting heal on your paladin, spare a moment to think about the young revolutionaries using your dress-up-and-pretend world to overthrow their governments. Reddit threads, discord servers and game worlds are increasingly taking on the shape of unions, guilds and cadres as these relatively flexible, heterogenous structures feature more and more heavily in the politi...

Truly, nothing is new and everything has happened before and so we find ourselves, amidst a collapsing geopolitical order with some very fancy gadgets (an expensive plane and some chips) going wanting and going missing. What connects them? A rumour that, coincidentally, started about the same time that JD Vance turned up in Munich to shake the NATO tree.  To some it might be conspiracy, but never...

We’ve all wanted our own patch of land to do what we want, right? Little bit of crypto? Pharmaceutical experiments? Human cloning? Well the manifest destiny trolley has come back around again and they’re serving up ‘freedom cities.’ Now your little slice of paradise comes with a big helping of deregulation fantasies and a promise to build, build, build!  If you can even get it off the ground, that...

While you're being relentlessly bombarded with multi-trillion dollar projections, promises and prognostications for the latest gizmo a quiet giant has been gobbling up a market share that in real, right-now life is three times the size of the entirety of AR and VR. And it's right at your feet. This mundane product doesn't usually get a look-in with futurists and our first guest, luminary designer...

If the apocalypse was around the corner, would you want to know? Well good news for you, we may already be in it, but because it's hard to pin things down or look beyond the present it's hard to really know for sure.  In the 1960s, states were sending things into space with reckless abandon and now it might be coming back round to bite them. Almost literally. And it doesn't help that billionaires...

You haven't seen everything they could do with mushrooms until you've seen a disaster rescue robot powered by a mycelium brain. Of course, mycelium's been the fêted darling of futurists, designers and technologists for the last few years and maybe you thought you'd had enough but, what if this cute little fellow is the route out of the computational cul-de-sac we might have driven ourselves into?

Sometime in 2028, the world's largest private yacht sets sail. Forever. Getting yourself a berth will set you back 10 million bucks but you'll be guarded by the world's most elite ex-military, have a pretty sweet gym and hey, if you fancy it, the ship can dock so you can experience how real people live. Maritime apocalyptic escapes are hardly new but... there's quite a lot of them around at the mo...

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