Futurology is a method that employs a variety of tools to “discover realities” of how things will be in the long-term. It is not a random divination technique like clairvoyance, but rather a field that is currently studied and taught at prestigious universities. What started out as scenario-modeling has evolved into a practice sought out by companies and governments. Futures Studies — colloquially known as “futures” by practitioners in this discipline — seeks to understand what things are likely to continue and what things can plausibly change.

The first companies to adopt the practice  were in the energy sector. But they were not the only ones. In 1971 Pierre Wank, a planner for Shell, successfully speculated about oil shortages and price increases. The trend has since continued to consolidate and expand to different areas of economic and political affairs. In January of 2020 the current Spanish government, headed by Pedro Sánchez, created the Oficina Nacional de Prospectiva y Estrategia National (National Forecasting and Strategy Office), a management agency reporting directly to the Presidency that was created with the intent to “think structurally about Spain over the next 30 years.”

Why does it matter? Because powerful corporations, governments, leaders and entrepreneurs all use the predictions from futurology to make complex decisions.

• Futurology is big business these days. While the defense industry has been using it for decades, now everybody from technology companies to food companies are turning to this discipline.
• “If you lift a cup of coffee to your mouth and drink from it, you are implicitly predicting that it is not poisoned, or you won’t burn yourself. From there it is only a matter of degree to predict what the world may be like a thousand years from now or a million years from now,” explained Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute, to the BBC news network.
• Futurologists use a range of sophisticated, complex and sometimes mind-boggling techniques to make their predictions. Cross-impact analysis, real-time Delphis, decision models and morphological analysis are some of their tools.
• “Forecasting is a discipline that studies the future in order to understand it and try to influence it. We are like any other social science; we work rigorously and with maximum empiricism. But studying the future does not mean that we predict it; our job is to pose various possible scenarios and, at best, to make forecasts,” explains Jordi Serra, deputy director of the Center for Postnormal Policy & Futures Studies (CPPFS).
• In one of its latest issues, the Spanish edition of Forbes magazine made a list of Spain’s 40 best futurists. You can review the report by clicking on the following link: https://forbes.es/listas/102025/los-40-mejores-futuristas-de-espana/

A bit of history. There are two main worldwide currents in the study of futurology. The first is of North American origin and the second is European, mainly French.

• Prediction is the old term used for this field. It was the English author and political philosopher HG Wells, one of the earliest science fiction writers and a classic in the field of anticipation literature, who in 1932 called for the establishment of “Departments and Professors of Foresight,” heralding the development of modern futurology 40 years before its time. Wells was years ahead of his time in predicting nuclear weapons in 1914, which later inspired physicist Leo Szilard.
• In 1931, in celebration of its 80th anniversary, the New York Times consulted with several prominent men to get their predictions of what life would be like in 2011. There were some successes. William Mayo predicted that life expectancy would rise to 70 years, or perhaps beyond. Other predictions as to population aging or the diminished importance of national barriers were promising.
• A similar exercise took place at a Chicago exhibition in 1893, looking ahead to 1993. Although there were many misguided predictions, it was accurately anticipated that Florida would become a tourist destination, and the politician John J. Ingalls got it right when he wrote that it would be possible to travel from New York to London in less than a day.

Famous bets: For a number of years  political scientist Herman Kahn (1922-1983) directed the Hudson Institute, a renowned U.S. research center still in existence today, and became famous as a futurologist when he predicted that Japan would become a world economic power.

• Kalev Leetaru, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois has been working on automating a process for predicting the future. He demonstrated that many of the events that shaped the Arab Spring were foreshadowed by months and years of latent “feelings of change” reflected in the literature.
• Futurologist Alvin Toffler enthralled millions of people worldwide with his predictions about everything from the creation of the Internet to a new wave of drug use and crime. Toffler’s work caught the attention of key international figures of his time, including Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang and Mexican businessman Carlos Slim, all of whom sought advice from the guru of the future.

See it coming. If there is one thing that governments and companies have complained about in recent years, it is that there are issues they really just “didn’t see coming.” But if one keeps track of some of the names that interpret our present, it becomes easier not to miss the signals.

• One of the futurists that everyday people should be following these days is the American physicist Michio Kaku, who is currently engaged in seeing what the world will be like in the year 2100. Kaku assures us that we will be able to manipulate objects with our minds, create perfect bodies, lengthen our existence, develop new forms of life, travel in non-polluting vehicles that will float effortlessly and send interstellar spacecraft to explore nearby stars, among many other previously unthinkable wonders.
• Yuval Noah Harari does not use a cell phone and spends much of his day away from the incessant flow of information that floods through the Internet. The futurist philosopher and history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has become something of a guru admired by Silicon Valley elites, according to the BBC. At a talk given at a packed auditorium in San Francisco, covered by The New York Times, Harari said that the way things are going political parties could lose their reason for existing.
• Another prophet of our times is Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, whose predictions are 80% accurate. His books, The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines, put him at the top of the futurology heap at the time by anticipating the fall of the U.S.S.R., the defeat of Kasparov by a computer, and the wireless internet, among other things.