N.A. Drescher

Films love predicting the future. Books have been imagining the future for a hundred years. H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley tried to envision the real world of tomorrow. So did James Cameron. Are these highly creative minds considered futurists? If not, then what is a futurist?   The answer, like most of futurism, is complex.  Let's dive right in. What Is Futurism? According to the dictionary, futurism has a couple of meanings. a) An adherence to the future; b) The study of the future and predictions about the future Both definitions are a little vague but that's the dictionary for you. They're also not entirely correct.  You see, futurism is more than movies and sci-fi books. It affects every major discipline, particularly in the sciences, but also in economics, politics, design, and even law.  Futurism is indeed the study of the future, but real futurists avoid making predictions. They look for trends and attempt to follow those trends through to their logical development. 

We’ve all been there. As tech enthusiasts, we spend most of our time conversing with other people in the know. But when I casually mentioned the upcoming Libra crypto to my mom, I was met with a blank stare. It was a bit of a revelation. Until now I had just assumed that Libra was front-page news everywhere. I couldn’t believe that my mom had never heard of it. “But Mum!” I stammered (she’s British) “It’s all over Facebook!” Apparently, it’s only all over Facebook for me. I had forgotten about those algorithms. Who knows what Facebook is feeding my mom? If you’ve ever been stumped by a Baby Boomer’s reaction to technology that will change the course of the future, you’ll know what I was feeling. But it doesn’t have to be so. And thankfully I was able to gather myself together and explain Libra, a blockchain, and cryptocurrency to my mom in a way that she understood. Here’s how I did it. Our Moms Oh, the Baby Boomer generation. They look so cool in those 1960s films, wh