Journal of Futures Studies/未來研究叢刊
淡江大學未來學研究所,正常發行
選擇卷期
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Future estrangement is a profound sense of alienation toward the future. It is the deep-seated feeling that the future is a hostile and bewildering world that we may not have a place in - or may not want to have a place in. This paper outlines numerous impending threats that are the main sources of future estrangement and discusses strategies to overcome this perilous attitude toward the future. Ultimately, reversing the spread of future estrangement will require both addressing its root causes and building resiliency at all levels and in all domains of society.
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The novel pathogen Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), has created a global crisis. Currently, the limits of public health systems and medical knowhow have been exposed. COVID-19 has challenged our best minds, forcing them to return to the drawing board. Fear of infection leading to possible life-long morbidity or death has embedded itself in the collective imagination leading to both altruistic and maladaptive behaviours. Although, COVID-19 has been a global concern, its advent is a defining moment for artificial intelligence. Medicorobots have been increasingly used in hospitals during the last twenty years. Their various applications have included logistic support, feeding, nursing support and surface disinfection. In this article we examine how COVID-19 is reframing technology/human interactions via medicorobots, and the future implications of this relationship. In the last section we predict possible developments in artificial intelligence and how they may benefit future humanity in medicine.
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Treating fear as a kind of scape risks overlooking its peculiar temporality. Fear is, we argue, only ever established as a motivator, for social change for example, after the occurrences that gave rise to it, hence at some point in the future. This retro-clarity poses problems for the commonplace practice of treating fear as a causal explanation for things. Following this warning, we explain fear's peculiar temporality. Fear is, we argue, only ever constituted at the moment of its commission. Indeed, it is this present-ness of fearful events that accounts for the very things that make them so fearful - their appearance as emergent, chaotic and unexpectedly obtrusive within the normalcy of everyday life and the normal flow of time. Finally, we argue, this calls for reconceptualization of fear within Future Studies, away from a focus on fearful future dystopias towards recognition of how the fearfulness of events arises precisely from their present-ness and un-anticipatability.
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The arrival of the COVID-19 virus has led to an acceleration of four trends in our modern, technology-focused societies: the development of ITopia (a dystopian future where technology undermines our humanity) with its imbalanced computational rationality; the collapse of sensemaking; the spread of a culture of pessimism and misanthropy; and the denial of death. This article makes the case for the practice of embodied presence (mindfulness) and cognitive responsibility as means to return to a more grounded experience of life, consciousness and self amongst modern populations, and thus to help resolve these four problems.
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This paper investigates the systemic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and experiments with using two foresight methods with different time horizons to broaden the exploration. The Futures Wheel of consequences is applied to the global shock and pandemic of COVID-19 to firstly analyse systemic impacts of the virus within a short to medium timeframe. Then, four macrohistorical models are applied, to time two probable future trajectories resulting from the bifurcation point of the pandemic. The conclusion provides: (1) insights on the methodology of integrating the Futures Wheel and Macrohistory and proposes that they are indeed complimentary if a common spatial scale is used to link them, and (2) that the city is a practical and effective spatial scale to integrate the methods and their systemic impacts, and (3) real world actions in response to the pandemic, at the scale of the city, that may require further research.
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Causal Layered Analysis is a critical part of futures education because it helps students deepen their understanding of controversial issues. However, critical thinking about the future is new and challenging to most students. This study will examine how the analytical framework of intersectionality can provide a structure to help students use Causal Layered Analysis. ＂Intersectionality＂ interprets how different social identities and/or social problems are interrelated; as such, it encourages students to consider more evidence about issues, make connections between different pieces of information, and envision solutions to complex problems.
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We are facing a planetary ecological crisis due to global warming, despoliation of our natural resources, mass scale industrial pollution, desertification, deforestation, widespread collapse of ecosystems, and extreme climate change. World overpopulation is nearing a record tipping-point, where food and water scarcity will bring about more famine, drought, pestilence, and death. Global catastrophic hazards have escalated due to the environmental crisis, encroachment by man, destabilized markets, hegemonic politics, the ubiquitous dread of nuclear war, terrorism, infectious diseases, techno nihilism, and psychological self-interest driving everything from vain desire to the local economy and international relations, not to mention the anathema of evil, abuse, trauma, greed, and the psychopathology of everyday life. Our recalcitrant dependency on fossil fuel is gradually suffocating the planet. Greenhouse warming, climate catastrophes, and aberrant weather phenomena occur every day throughout the globe and yet we do very little to mitigate it, let alone reverse its course. Moreover, we have caused the Anthropocene. Despite the fact that we see the ruin with our own eyes and do practically nothing to mitigate the ecological crisis, world masses have adopted a global bystander effect, where denial and abnegation of social responsibility lie at its very core. Regardless of the degree of gravity we assign to these calculated risks imperiling our existence, we cannot ignore the ominous threat of planetary extinction unless humanity unites in moral preventative action. After offering an adumbrated exposition of our ecological crisis, I examine these complexifications through a combined methodology relying on causal layered analysis, risk mitigation concerns, and foresight praxis as new directions in futures studies.
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The big data revolution is heralding an era where instrumentation, datafication, and computation are increasingly pervading the very fabric of cities. Big data technologies are seen as a powerful force that has great potential for improving and advancing urban sustainability thanks especially to the IoT. Therefore, they have become essential to the functioning of sustainable cities. Besides, yet knowing to what extent we are actually making any progress towards sustainable cities remains problematic, adding to the conflicting, or at least fragmented, picture that arises of change on the ground in the light of the escalating urbanization trend. In a nutshell, new circumstances require new responses. One of these responses that has recently gained prevalence worldwide is the idea of ＂data-driven smart sustainable cities.＂ This paper sets out to identify and integrate the underlying components of a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future. This entails amalgamating the prevailing and emerging paradigms of urbanism in terms of their strategies and solutions, namely compact cities, eco-cities, data-driven smart cities, and environmentally data-driven smart sustainable cities. This amalgamation is grounded in the outcomes of the four case studies conducted on six of the ecologically and technologically leading cities in Europe. This empirical research is part of an extensive futures study, which aims to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future using backcasting as a strategic planning process. We argue that the proposed model has great potential to improve and advance the contribution of sustainable cities to the goals of sustainability by harnessing its synergistic effects thanks to data-driven technologies and solutions. This new model is believed to be the first of its kind and thus has not been, to the best of our knowledge, produced, nor is it currently under investigation, elsewhere.
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Trend mapping and analysis are common practice for organizations. However, the emphasis on trends, and the sheer volume of predictions about the future, might be creating confusion about what society should prioritize. Introducing a minimum specification for future-proofing may help cut through the noise and surface what is needed for us to ensure a sustainable, viable future for humanity. This essay will introduce the proposed specification, the rationale behind it, and will illustrate the value of taking this approach by using the discourse on the future of work as an example.