Beyond Human Futures Studies to Post-Human Futures Studies
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is human futures studies (especially in regard to preferable futures), as a field of study, really so valuable that, as Alan Kay once confidently put it, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”? (TE 2017) This positive view on human futures studies can be contrasted with the opposing one by Jason Taylor, who critically pointed out that “[s]ome of the predictions out there are frankly an insult.” (TE 2017a)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human futures studies (in relation to forecasting and backcasting—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no forecasting without backcasting (and vice versa), to be explained by the “forecasting-backcasting principle” (and other ones) in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Of course, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human futures studies is valueless, or that those diverse fields (related to human futures studies)—such as sociology, economics, political science, technology studies, history, art, philosophy, mathematics, science fiction, futurology, systems science, literary criticism, hermeneutics, religion, physics, artificial intelligence, psychology, military studies, earth sciences, biology, and so on—should be rejected. (WK 2017) Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human futures studies (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between forecasting and backcasting (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the theory of post-human futures studies) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human futures studies (in relation to the dialectic relationship between forecasting and backcasting—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.