Seizing tomorrow

Ask most people and they’ll tell you they take the future very seriously. Ask a politician and they’ll bore you into the ground with a 50-point action plan. Hopeless, says Richard Slaughter, who’s just become president of the World Futures Studies Federation. He’s a professor of futures studies based at the Australian Foresight Institute within Swinburne University of Technology, and he reckons the way we think about the future is all wrong. What we should do is study it systematically if we are to stand the faintest chance of avoiding the disasters that are rushing to meet us. For him, understanding the future may also…