Jamais Cascio on Forecasting the Future, Climate Change and Geoengineering and the Biggest Threats to Human Civilization

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Jamais Cascio (@cascio) is a writer, speaker and futurist that focuses on the intersection of emerging technologies, environmental dilemmas, and cultural transformation, specializing in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future — writing mainly on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking, emphasizing the power of openness, transparency and flexibility as catalysts for building a more resilient society atopenthefuture.org.

Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a Top 100 Global Thinker, Jamais Cascio specializes in the creation of provocative future scenarios. He explores emerging possibilities in print and in speaking events world-wide, and has appeared in in multiple television and film documentaries. Cascio serves as Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future, and published his first non-fiction book, HACKING THE EARTH, in 2009. He was a featured speaker at the TED 2006 conference, “The Future We Will Create,” in Monterey, California.

“My worst-case scenario is us continuing to have short-term-track thinking.” — Jamais Cascio

In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover many things, including:

• Why we may be heading towards a 5–6 degree warmer world
• The biggest threats to humanity’s existence
• How technology and humanity intertwine and co-evolve
• Why Jamais is pessimistic in the short term and optimistic in the long term
• Jamais’ thoughts on the cons of geo engineering
• The important but often overlooked drivers climate change
• Why Jamais forecasts rather than predicts the future
• The actual implications of autonomous driving and automation
• Why our political and economic systems are outdated and how to fix this
• Why the future may have a lot more sex and drugs

NOTE: A couple times Jamais references terms/concepts which popularly used yet politically charged like pink-collar jobs. He is in no way endorsing or a fan of gender-roles/stereotypes but just observing them in action.

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