š® We need more futurism in Washington
How about a Strategic Foresight Advisory Board that reports directly to the president?
ā A quick note: I will be traveling through the middle of July and will be posting a bit less than usual, and perhaps a bit shorter than usual.
Super-Short Summary: In an era of rapid technological change and global uncertainty, America needs a renewed focus on strategic foresight. The US has largely abandoned non-military government efforts to systematically consider the future, a shift that proved costly in the face of challenges like 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis ā not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic. These events revealed a critical "failure of imagination" in anticipating potential threats. To better prepare itself going forward, America must revive future-oriented thinking. Proposals include reinstating the Office of Technological Assessment and establishing a President's Foresight Advisory Board. By embracing strategic foresight, the country can better navigate emerging technologies and global challenges.
What does it mean to be a conservative futurist? The āconservativeā part means embracing technological progress and economic growth while upholding classical liberal values of individual freedom and market capitalism. The āfuturistā part involves creating conditions for innovation and upward mobility. It rejects rigid central planning. Instead, the focus is on creating an environment where people are free to pursue their desired futures within a democratic, self-correcting system. (The best way to prepare for problems both expected and unexpected is by being a rich, technological advanced, and a well governed century.)
I get thatās not the commonly accepted definition or description of āfuturist." (Same goes, unfortunately, for āconservativeā these days.) My writing aims, in part, to shape readers' perspectives on potential short-term and long-term futures. But I don't employ formal methods like scenario planning. That said, I do see value in such approaches. Indeed, the key conservative futurist I highlight in my 2023 book (The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised) is Herman Kahn, considered perhaps the godfather of scenario planning. This from Strategy + Business:
The seeds of scenario planning methodology were planted in the late 1940s, when the futurist Herman Kahn, then a young defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, started telling brief stories to describe the many possible ways that nuclear weapons technology might be used by hostile nations. (For this, Scientific American described Mr. Kahn as āthinking the unthinkable,ā a characterization he embraced gleefully.) Near Randās Southern California offices, Mr. Kahn hung out with screenwriters and moviemakers ā one of whom, Stanley Kubrick, used him as a model for Dr. Strangelove, and another of whom, Leo Rosten, suggested the name āscenariosā for these storytelling exercises. But by the mid-1960s, Mr. Kahnās methods had become a mechanistic smorgasbord approach, serving up dozens of possible forecasts (often generated with mainframe computers).
I tell the story of the rise and fall of American futurism in my book, with one result that, unlike other rich nations, America has pretty much abandoned non-military efforts by government to think systematically about the future. In the 1970s, three US government institutions began to devote serious resources to looking ahead: the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, Congressional Research Service, and Congressional Budget Office, which produces the long-term federal budget projections that today guide much of our political debate. The Futures Research Group at CRS was eliminated in the early 1980s, and Congress put OTA out of business in 1995.
It didnāt take long for the shift away from future-oriented thinking in the late 20th century to reveal itself as a massive error in the early 21st century.
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