Thinking about the future allows us to imagine what kind of future we want to live in and how we can get there. In 2018 we celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of the founding of the Institute for the Future (IFTF). No other futures organization has survived for this long; we've actually survived our own forecasts! In these five decades we learned a lot, and we still believe--even more strongly than before--that systematic thinking about the future is absolutely essential for helping people make better choices today, whether you are an individual or a member of an educational institution or government organization. We view short-termism as the greatest threat not only to organizations but to society as a whole. In my twenty years at the Institute, I've developed five core principles for futures thinking: If somebody tells you they can predict the future, don't believe them. Nobody can predict large socio-technical transformations and what exactly these are going to look like. We are getting better at making point predictions.

When you've got a discography like Todd Howard's, full of critically acclaimed games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, it must be hard to pick a favourite. But there is one game he remembers more fondly than anyone else does: the first he ever worked on. "Terminator: Future Shock," he says. "When [Bethesda] came to Fallout, people were saying, oh, you're doing a post-apocalyptic open world! But we already did that in Terminator. It's an underrated game that not a lot of people played. I think Quake came out right afterwards, that might have had something to do with it, and understandably so … Future Shock was made with eight or 10 people and it did a lot of things that no game had done. I remember it got critiqued at the time, which annoyed me to be honest. But now the things it did are commonplace."

By 2025, the lines separating culture, information technology and health will be blurred. Engineering biology, machine learning and the sharing economy will establish a framework for decentralising the healthcare continuum, moving it from institutions to the individual. Propelling this forward are advances in artificial intelligence and new supply chain delivery mechanisms, which require the real-time biological data that engineering biology will deliver as simple, low-cost diagnostic tests to individuals in every corner of the globe. As a result, morbidity, mortality and costs will decrease in acute conditions, such as infectious diseases, because only the most severe cases will need additional care. Fewer infected people will leave their homes, dramatically altering disease epidemiology while decreasing the burden on healthcare systems.

Future Shock: 25 trends in education post COVID-19.By Sandeep Goyal This Future Shock series is inspired by the Alvin Toffler book with the same name, first published in the 1970s. The book future gazed a rapidly changing world, propelled into newer and newer orbits by not just science and technology, but by newer political realities, sociological change and the emergence of newer opportunities, newer aspirations and newer lifestyles. But even Toffler had not visualized a world faced with cataclysmic change because of a pandemic, a metamorphosis triggered by a virus. Most governments around the world have temporarily closed educational institutions in an attempt to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some 1.3-1.5 billion students and youth across the planet are affected by school and university closures. These nationwide closures are impacting over 72% of the world's student population. Several other countries have implemented localized closures impacting millions of additional learners. Governments around the world are making efforts to mitigate the immediate impact of school closures, particularly for more vulnerable and disadvantaged communities, and to facilitate the continuity of education for all through remote learning. School closures carry high social and economic costs for people across communities. Their impact however is particularly severe for the most vulnerable and marginalized boys and girls, and their families.

Weather wars, authoritarian surveillance, social control, and more are "Future Shocks" that could fundamentally destabilize the world as we know it, according to the WEF. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is currently underway in Davos, Switzerland, but a week before the event, the WEF Global Risks Report 2019 was published identifying weather manipulation tools, social control through biometric surveillance, AI "woebots" that can feed on human emotions, and more as "Future Shocks" that could forever alter the course of human history. "Authoritarianism is easier in a world of total visibility and traceability" The WEF report for 2019 lists 10 "Future Shocks," which are not predictions, but rather "food for thought and action" about current technologies and trends that have the potential to shake up society, for good or ill, in the very near future. Since we at The Sociable like to focus on the technological side of things, especially as how it relates to social impact, let's take a closer look at the Future Shocks that pertain more to technology. "Weather manipulation tools-- such as cloud seeding to induce or suppress rain--are not new" Make no mistake, weather manipulation tools do exist, yet not a single government or group has claimed responsibility for using this technology as a weapon.

This article accompanies episode 10 of The Anthill podcast on the future. From Humans to Westworld, from Her to Ex Machina, and from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D to Black Mirror – near future science fiction in recent years has given audiences some seriously unsettling and prophetic visions of the future. According to these alternative or imagined futures, we are facing a post-human reality where humans are either rebelled against or replaced by their own creations. These stories propose a future where our lives will be transformed by science and technology, redefining what it is to be human. The near future science fiction sub-genre imagines a future only a short time away from the period in which it is produced.

IN 1951, a man invented a fabric that never gets dirty and doesn't wear out. He should have been lauded but instead he was threatened and hounded by those who feared he was about to kill the clothing industry with his one suit that would last a lifetime. The good news is that he was a work of fiction, played by Alec Guinness in the British Ealing Studios comedy The Man in the White Suit. But believe it or not, exactly such a fabric is not far away. The modern version could result in a suit that can house computers, recharge batteries and even put on a light show.