Institute For The Future

Designing an Ethical Operating System

How do you build something you won’t regret? It’s a question that deserves its fair share of thought, especially in Silicon Valley where countless...

Equitable Futures Week Has No Boundaries

How do we illustrate the systems of equity as clearly as we describe systems of inequity? How can we describe what it feels like to walk around in an...

Digital Twins

“What if” is a common question in every organization, because it’s the first step in optimizing existing processes or developing new ones. There are...

Looking at Organizational and Urban Futures #EquitableFutures

Learn about the #EquitableFutures Nodes at Culture Bank, Cal State University East Bay, and ExT in...

Equitable Futures Week in New Mexico & Atlanta, GA

Nodes continue to commit to envisioning a more equitable future for 2030.

Cutting the Akashic Records

Science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”...

Equitable Futures Nodes: Oakland, Oaxaca, Sudan and Colombia

Meet our first Equitable Futures Nodes, learn how they envision a more equitable future in 2030, and follow their stories on social...

What Lies Beyond the Virtual Assistant

The age of the intelligent agent is upon us, but the true consequences of their emergence remain largely unexplored. Is Siri just another genre of...

What Does Your Spoon Stand For?

The idea of technology as morally neutral is pervasive. We are told that it is only the use of a technology that makes it good or bad. But, technology...

The Ethical OS

A guide to anticipating the future impact of today's technology

Your New Telepresence Superpowers

Thuc Vu, CEO and Co-founder of the Silicon Valley startup OhmniLabs, says his favorite thing to do with a telepresence robot is to cook with his...

Universal Basic Assets

IFTF’s Executive Director Marina Gorbis spent years exploring and making sense of how technology will transform work and organizations. In her 2013...

The IFTF Foresight Training Experience: A First-Timer’s View

I’ve been practicing strategic foresight for nearly a year now. I joined IFTF in early 2018, supporting Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen. Bob taught...

Post Money

People don’t want products or services. They want their desires fulfilled. People will increasingly outsource this important job to software happiness...

Embodied Learning

In 1990, Steve Jobs famously promoted the computer as “the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” In some ways, that’s how computers are still...

Teaching Robots How to Work Together

In a video created by the Automatic Coordination of Teams Lab at the University of Southern California, a set of 49 drones line the floor of an empty...

New Policy Platform Outlines Solutions to Address Deceptive Digital Politics

A Framework from MapLight and Institute for the Future to Safeguard U.S. Elections

The Rise of Computational Propaganda

On January 17, 2014, Girl 4 Trump USA joined Twitter. She was silent for a week, but on January 24, she suddenly got busy, posting an average of 1,289...

Who's in Control?

Navigating levels of autonomy: Over the next decade, autonomous bots and machines will migrate out of a few select industries and terrains and become...

Rewriting the Rules of Reality

Standing on the desert surface of Tatooine, you instinctively duck as the Millennium Falcon swoops in for a thunderous and dramatic landing beside...

Black Twitter and the Future of Digital Disobedience

In an interview not long ago, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone was asked if he had ever heard of “Black Twitter.” Stone admitted he had not, but wondered...

Complexity Made Simple

How is it that termites are able to build towering cathedrals out of mud without referring to a set of blueprints? How do ants, without a leader...

So You Want to be a Thing on the Internet

Hi there. You’re awake. And look, you’re not alone anymore. There are other machines. Some are like you, many are...

Why We Communicate

We are on the verge of a set of technological advances that will transform when, where, how, and why we communicate. The Internet of Things, advances...