futuremastery blog

Is there a meaning to history?

Can we discern recurring patterns over centuries, giving us a sense of the direction of things to come? More importantly, can we derive from these patterns insights into the threats and opportunities awaiting businesses and individuals, gaining practical...

As history has shown, species that fail to adapt to changing conditions are ultimately wiped out. This raises an often unforeseen but implacable question: Is a new evolutionary holocaust coming with the impending global transition crisis?

In the Permian extinction event 250 million years...

How far is the future? As sci-fi writer William Gibson coined decades ago: "It is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.” We see it every day: from next-generation humanoid robots to CRISPR-engineered synthetic life creations and sentient artificial intelligence...

Innovation has a bright side. It also has a dark one, like the two-faced Janus divinity, the god of duality, of beginnings and ends, of creation and destruction.

Where do its flaws lie? Rarely in the technology itself. More frequently in the applications we make of it. But also in our own...

How will we live tomorrow?

Thinkers have always dreamed of foreseeing human life in the decades to come. Comparing the predictions of past futurists to what actually transpired, we must recognize that this is often a perilous exercise...

Our foresight tends to be a simple linear projection...

Troubled times are periods of anguish and despair. Sometimes, they are also periods of miracles.  A moment when the pressure of circumstances helps us to achieve things that we could not have imagined doing in normal times. When the impossible suddenly becomes possible

Indeed, we live...

Threats of epidemics, climate changes, energy crisis, economic recession, war: when we look at TV news shows each day, headlines are far from reassuring....

And, as we highlighted in previous posts, the prospects are not more reassuring. As if we were collectively heading to catastrophes....

Humanity has had a dream for millennia: what if we could master our fate? What if we could achieve the ambition of magicians, prophets, and scientists to be able to predict the future and take control of our destiny?

With all the unanswered questions arising. What would remain of free...

There has been a hot debate for millennia: Is there some predestination in history? Are civilizations heading in a foreseeable direction? Or is history “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as stated in Macbeth?

Beyond the generational cycles...

‘Those who forget the past are condemned to revive it. Again, and again’. In our times of accelerated change, rarely has this old saying been more challenged. Is this old wisdom still valid in the era of artificial intelligence, the metaverse, and quantum computing? Or are we...

We must recognize it: the world around us is on the edge of chaos. We see it every day on the news about the war in Ukraine, inflation, the energy crisis, and the upcoming resurgence of the Covid pandemic. Geopolitical, social, and economic tensions flourish everywhere. Old nations tremble...

We all know business or human life is a spark of light in the dark silence of the universe. A brief journey from rise to fall that we will endure just as thousands of corporate and human generations have endured it before us. This is what we have known for generations.

But...

A deep economic crisis, a worldwide pandemic, and the start of a new world war in Ukraine: The last few years have seen dramatic events unfold. And even darker times seem to await us, with many investment firms now expecting an upcoming financial "hurricane". At the dawn of a...