Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash
Surprise is the new normal. But how to cope with surprises, how to develop management policies when wild cards spoil all attempts to prediction? – These is the main topic of a new paper of Karlheinz that appeared in a publication of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency PBL. The paper is...
In a paper that has recently been published online in the journal The American Sociologist, Karlheinz Steinmüller has given an outline of the development of futures studies in the German Democratic Republic: „The Rise and Decline of Prognostics. Futures Studies, Ideology and the Sociology of Knowl...
Standards of Futures Research. Guidelines for Practice and Evaluation
Finally, an English translation of the book about standards and quality criteria of futures research has appeared. In addressing cross-cutting issues of quality in futures research, the authors have identified three underlying...
The old vision of precise, objective, reliable predictions, issued by a kind of supercomputer, has gained new foothold by progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). But what can realistically be expected from the use of AI in futures studies? In 2021, the Netzwerk Zukunftsforschung organ...
Future is a field of hopes and fears and never neutral. Most social and political controversies are underpinned by emotional images of the future. As a scientific approach to the future, futures studies attempts in difference to construct and use objective, evidence-based images of the future: scena...
Work is one of the pivotal themes of futures studies since its beginnings: Reduction of working hours, employment models, services as the new, most important industrial sector, return of the artisans, gig work … - to mention just some of the topics. The future of work became even more discussed afte...
„Is this the Future, or can it be discarded?“ This is a very funny documentary by Volker Strübung about old and new visions of the future, including the visions of East Germany. Karlheinz Steinmüller is featured as one of the interviewees; and the novel Andymon - as the only SF book - has also it...
Existential Threats for Humankind:
Climate change is not the only threat that endangers humankind as a whole. Think about asteroid impacts, nuclear war or risks from alien or artificial intelligence. Risk researcher Lars Gerhold and Karlheinz Steinmüller have analysed twenty existential threats in...
Will Coronavirus unite or divide our society? Stress testing of D2030 scenarios reveals coming cleavages in our society. We are at a bifurcation with reasons for optimism but no certainty. A reassessment of pre-crisis D2030 scenarios exposes a shift in our perceptions of the future due to the pandem...
In 2017 the initiative group D2030 constructed scenarios for the future of Germany with the time horizon 2030. We generated them in an extensive participatory process with hundreds of participants, several workshops and a final conference. A consistency analysis of 33 key factors with 149 future p...
The pandemic is an old acquaintance to foresight people. We had it in our wild card portfolio since about 25 years. It appears in our book on Wild Cards. Of course, there are differences. We speculated about a much more deadly pandemic, but we had no clear image about its economic impact (not to s...
Megatrends are a popular way to speak about the future, but they tell more about the specific zeitgeist than about possible futures.
On March 6, 2020, in conjunction with the World Future Day the Finnish “National Foresight Network” organized a “Foresight Friday” at Helsinki. Its topic was “Shap...
All futures are uncertain, but some are even more uncertain. - This was the reason for Karlheinz Steinmüller and his colleagues Roman Peperhove and Hans-Liudger Dienel to edit a book dedicated to research areas with high uncertainties: "Envisioning Uncertain Futures". The book contains a collection...
"Continue like this" and "policy on sight" have their advantages, but these are not really convincing options in the long run. In a total of four scenarios (and six sub-scenarios), Klaus Burmeister, Alexander Fink, Beate Schulz-Montag and Karlheinz Steinmüller have described in shich direction Germa...
Futurology deals primarily with burning problems of the present. But even a speculative look into the distant future allows insights. Which basic development paths, biological-evolutionary, technological, social, are conceivable for mankind? Where are existential dangers lurking? What does the "sile...