Reading Time: 11 minutes It’s been a rough few days for anyone following flu season data. While China has eased zero-COVID restrictions in the face of protests, despite currently experiencing a surge in case count (along with Japan), North American hospitals face what the American Medical Association is openly calling a “tripledemic”: a wave of flu, Respiratory Syncytial Virus […]
futurism
Posted inThe Future
The longtermism that works—and the kind that doesn’t
Reading Time: 10 minutes In 2004, a tsunami and earthquake killed almost 230,000 people in 14 Indian Ocean countries. Many forms of relief then mouldered on the beaches—used clothes, high heel shoes, expired medicines—because “in-kind” donations are well known not to be effective forms of aid on a global scale. The wrong hair products to survivors of Hurricane Katrina. […]
Posted inTechnology
Anonymity, privacy, transparency, integrity: Do we even know the future we want?
Reading Time: 8 minutes In the late 2000s, research blossomed around our use of online avatars. Did our videogame icons and social media profiles represent our actual selves, our ideal selves, or something else entirely? And did they have a reciprocal impact, a “Proteus effect” that transformed self-perception? Did we change in the real world based how our online […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘The Peripheral’ plays it safe with William Gibson’s future thinking
Reading Time: 6 minutes In some ways, the opening scene of The Terminator (1984) had to have come as a relief to its first audiences. Gritty, darkly lit, with text grimly informing us that this was the city of Los Angeles in 2029, it showed us tank treads crushing human skulls beneath a machine-dominated gray skyline, with lasers and […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
On ‘tomorrow sorrow’: How we grieve the future today
Reading Time: 7 minutes I was six years old when Star Trek: The Next Generation first aired one of its most beloved episodes, “The Inner Light.” In it, Captain Jean-Luc Picard wakes to a life not his own. He lives in a small village, where he works as an iron weaver, and everyone explains that he is recovering from […]
Posted inTechnology
Is AI art causing future shock, or age-old economic anxiety?
Reading Time: 8 minutes At the turn of the twentieth century, Canadians were notorious pirates. Oh yes. You wouldn’t know it to look at us (well, minus all the stealing we’d done from Indigenous communities), but we were lean, mean, thieving machines… when it came to sheet music. Remember, this was before TV, and just as radio was getting […]