Farsight, Issue 15

Farsight unpacks the most urgent issues shaping tomorrow, fusing analysis and speculation to spotlight emerging change and challenge assumptions about the future. Insights from our resident futurists are included alongside articles and interviews from an international network of journalists and expert contributors, all brought to life through striking illustration and design. Farsight is published by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, a non-profit think-tank (NGO) founded with the principle that many futures are always in play, and that future thinking can help us better make sense of them. Farsight helps readers map out these worlds and understand their own agency in shaping the future that they desire.

In this issue: 

We know that intelligence and cognition – the foundations of knowledge – can exist in far more forms than once thought.

Alongside the branching tree, we might also picture the swarm intelligence of insects or birds, the subterranean information exchange of the ‘wood wide web’, or slime molds that use techniques akin to machine learning to solve mazes.

Knowledge, too, is no longer bound to singular repositories like books, hard drives, or brains, but are increasingly created and shared in networks of technologies, and often float formlessly in the cloud.

So, what does the future of knowledge look like? In this issue, we take up that question.

We examine the limits of prediction, argue for the return of the polymath, and explore the future of learning and human-machine hybrid knowledge ecologies.

We consider the role of storytelling, alongside science, in making the world more futures literate. We trace the history (and future) of ‘stupidity’ (or rather: warnings of cognitive decline), explore what happens when technology increasingly mirrors biology, and make the case for why the mundane aspects of everyday life hold a missing key to understanding tomorrow.