Fiction to Futures Thinking.

The great Pause.

A time that no one saw coming. Not even the sharpest minds could have predicted that humanity would be brought to its knees, and that the gears of the world - turning relentlessly since time immemorial - would be brought to a grinding halt.

A shift to a digital and contact-less world had been in the offing, but this change seemed a gradual one. One that was expected to fully take hold only by the end of the decade. But the one catalyst that we never saw coming — the fact that man, a social animal, would now have to distance himself from the very society that powered his rise over the millennia — was enough to catapult humanity ten years into a future full of uncertainity.

The intial result was a bloodbath. Millions of jobs lost. Thousands of companies shut. Entire countries erupted in turmoil as citizens held their governments accountable, as systems once thought to be robust began to crumble from the shock — exposing faults and voids that left a majority of the world to fend for themselves.

But we humans are a gritty species — blessed with an indomitable will to survive, if nothing else.

Survive we will — but how do we insulate themselves from these shocks that tend to tear the very fabric of our reality apart? Is it possible to foresee these events before they happen, and prepare to not only survive these events, but rather thrive in such adversity? Was Isaac Asimov on to something when he wrote of psychohistory?

He spoke of a science that, taking into account the history, politics, economics, developments and general mindset of humanity, amongst other factors, could be used to determine the general direction of the world — in other words, indicate what the future had in store. Something that would be brushed aside by most as fiction — but what if there was some truth to the concept?

We humans subconsciously work under similar principles. We tend to record past instances, behaviours and mindsets of fellow humans and then predict (with reasonable accuracy) how future interactions with those individuals would go! We are then able to tag people as efficient, dependable, and so on, based on these very predictions and their accuracy over time.

Could we extrapolate this ability to cover masses of people, seeing humanity as one large collective organism? How much of it would remain fiction, and how much could turn into the future?

Could imagining the future impact the way we live in the present? What would that look like?