Futurist of a new type β an active practitioner
Futurist of a new type β an active practitioner
The futurist of the future must be a practitioner. Not because theory is useless, but because at the technological frontier, theory increasingly outpaces stable accumulated experience.
If a hypothesis concerns a system that almost no one has built yet, it is impossible to obtain a sufficiently reliable picture solely from other people's reports. One must personally encounter the constraints: cost, data, latency, maintenance, user behavior, integrations, and unexpected side effects.
Therefore, practical experimentation is part of the futurist's profession, not a supporting function.
A futurist of the new type must be able to go all the way from an idea to a minimal working verification. The cheaper the experiment, the less sense it makes to endlessly argue about a forecast instead of taking action.
Their value lies not in knowing the future, but in being able to approach it faster than others and test where their own model is wrong.