Futuresphere is a new think & act tank based in London, focusing initially on the UK.

The focus of Futuresphere will be on how we understand and how we can and cannot, should and should not, understand the future, particularly with reference to the impact of developing science and novel technologies on human activity economically, politically, socially and in our relationship to the natural world and how that has changed, is changing, should change and will change as the time unfolds; that is, historically, contemporaneously descriptively, prospectively and normatively.

Its methods will be inter-disciplinary, grounded primarily in political economy and institutional economics, with emphasis on the roles of uncertainty and human incertitude, time, space and place and the application (or not) of knowledge, reason and inference and belief to cybernetics and integrative, system-level organisation and control.

Futuresphere’s output will be oriented to public and private (institutional) policy at all levels of social organisation from the individual to the social and institutional to the global, planetary and human-species level. Its policy-topic coverage will be comprehensive. Ideologically and axiologically, its work will be pragmatic, synthetic and integrative, focusing on reconciling maximal personal freedom with the demands of a complex social and institutional environment; or, in other words, establishing the limits of personal, institutional, collective and state interests and action in the real world.

Analytically, our focus will be on how we cannot and cannot validly apply reason, knowledge, belief and learning from the past (a posteriori) to understand the future (a priori); that is, analytic inference through induction, abduction and deduction. These debates were explicitly initiated by Aristotle and continue to today; epistemology and, particularly, ontology are routinely ignored analytically or assumed away. Alternative and appropriate approaches remain methodologically contested. Our analyses will recognise these challenges and investigate and apply methodologically-valid inferential techniques to the policy issues we examine.

Our trading name is Futuresphere; our full company name is Futuresphere Prospectuary, a neologistic portmanteau of prospective and actuary. We will aim to combine a perspective on the prospective (foresight) with the rigorous methodology akin to actuarial method (to forecast). It won’t be easy, but worthwhile things seldom are.