A futurist must think in systems, not technologies

The phrase "technology can do this" is almost never sufficient to draw conclusions about the future.

Any implementation changes several flows at once: informational, financial, resource, organizational, human, and infrastructural.

Therefore, a futurist must ask questions broader than mere technical feasibility:

• who pays and for what;
• what data appears and how fast it grows;
• who maintains the system;
• how the logistics of decisions and resources change;
• what new dependencies arise;
• how people will behave;
• what will happen upon scaling;
• where a new bottleneck emerges.

Strong technical expertise is important, but insufficient on its own. A futurist must be sufficiently interdisciplinary so as not to build a correct technological model within an incorrect economic or organizational picture.

Hence two mandatory layers of verification: economic viability and supply chains, which determine the real speed and cost of changes.

This is one of the core competencies of a new-type futurist.