The Future. It’s all there, in front of us. It could go wonderfully. Or it could go badly wrong. It will inevitably require our passions and our ingenuity. So how do we see the challenges early on, find solutions and help make the world a better place? For ourselves, for our families, for everyone. Welcome to the Futureverse, brought to you by Intelligence Squared and Y TREE.
In this episode, Kamal Ahmed explores the history of the future as an idea. Dr Aleks Krotoski, social psychologist, researcher and science communicator, explains why planning for the future is at the heart of being human. With help from Dr Amanda Rees, a historian of science based at the University of York, and Alexander Boxer, author of A Scheme of Heaven, Kamal looks back at the history of the future as a concept; how have we juggled planning and prediction from ancient times through to modernity? And Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, gives us a glimpse into how we might be able to stream data into a giant simulator that could help us predict – and prepare for – events in the future