I’m trying to figure out how to organize my exploration since “The Future” writ large is too broad. Do we organize this around people? Around the five senses? Around industries? I was thinking industries but then realized that capitalism may be over by 2050 so maybe industry is too constrained.
The Institute for the Future organizes itself research labs in these areas:
Science + Technology
Anticipate the strategic impacts of AI and robotics, virtual and augmented reality, a rapidly evolving Internet of Actions, and cutting-edge bio-engineering, alongside new materials sciences that tap the tiniest forms of matter.
Economy + Environment
Leverage the evolution of a financialized society in a marketplace of distributed currencies and in an environment where the externalized costs of the past 50 years may be rapidly internalized by every organization.
Work + Learning
Redesign the workforce to meet organizational needs as both automation and demographic shifts demand new contracts between learning machines and humans, between organizations and platforms that strive to get things done.
Citizenship + Civic Systems
Rethink the interface between your organization and a volatile civic sphere where the rules for everything from regulation to cyber-security are being rewritten in the face of growing distrust in every level of governance.
Food + Health + Well-Being
Grow your strategic leadership in a world of opportunities and pitfalls as the complex systems of health care, food production, and human microbiology transform our understanding of what it means to eat well and be well.
Arup Foresight, a consultancy that digs into future issues, has publications in these areas but they aren’t necessarily bucketed.
Just riffing here on potential directions…
Ideology: What is the governing ideology thirty years from now? (What values do people believe in, what brings them together as a society, etc)
Economy: How does the economy work? What drives it?
Power: Where are there centers of power?
Survival/Health: How much of a future human is no longer made of “natural” parts? How engineered are future humans, i.e. embryos? What has come of disease? What threatens the survival of the human race?
Environment/Earth: Does Earth sustain life as we know it? If not, where is space exploration/science at this point?
Future Human 