Metafuturology

Futurologists aspire to be experts “above the specialties,” constructing their predictions by correlating the information provided by other disciplines. But contemporary futurology, especially in the US, is seriously compromised by three related flaws. First, futurologists are insufficiently neutral with regard to their prophecies; they confuse their role as describers of objective tendencies with their role as advisers to agents of power. As a result, they are often politically opportunistic and they construct self-fulfilling prophecies. Secondly, futurologists generally concentrate only on the material-technological base of civilization, ignoring the “imponderables,” the values and norms that motivate authentic human action. As a result, the influence of futurologists’ predictions contributes to the instrumentalization of cultural norms. Thirdly, futurologists have not developed a sufficiently rigorous theory to control their pragmatic tendency to value only what can be most easily measured. There is a great need for a metafuturology—which will study the limits and possibilities of scientific prediction. Each discipline should have a branch to deal with its future, to counteract the instrumental-pragmatism of futurology with a humanistic counterwejght. As a whole, metafuturology should deal with the two sets of factors that make the future indeterminate: the freedom of human collectives and the as yet unrecognized qualities of the universe. It should combine the work of conventional futurology with the work of the “second futurologists”—primarily astrophysicists studying the possibility of astrotechnical civilizations. Metafuturology must also actively imagine discoveries that might enable humanity to “leap out” of its antecedent history—as for example the breakdown of the “somatogenetic boundary” between the genotype and the cultural phenotype. Finally, metafuturology must consider the effect of actually existing norms on the development of material civilization. (IC-R)

Political science · Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies · Space exploration and regulation · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

• La SF de la Théorie

  Open Access•Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, István Csicsery‐rónay et al.•ReS Futurae•2023

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