I recently heard a story about writer whose role had shifted. They were no longer expected to write, but to help train an AI tool to write in their place.
What struck me wasn’t the technology (although it is remarkable how fast AI and LLMs are changing the creative landscape – another reflection for another time), but rather the position the person found themselves in. They were being asked to participate in building a future that made their own work increasingly precarious.
Of course, this writer isn’t alone. A quick scan through the tool I use to curate articles that might interest me suggests that this is fast becoming the new normal. And it’s not unique to writing, either Variations of this are appearing across many fields: people asked to optimise systems that displace them, automate judgement, or narrow their own agency.
When thinking about futures, I have to wonder: what happens when futures feel imposed rather than co-created?
Yes, futures have been imposed on humans since they year dot, so this is nothing new. And yet: we live in a time when many, especially in the Global North, have an expectation of agency, the idea that they have control over their lives to some extent. In this story, the future isn’t imposed on someone unaware of it: they are complicit in writing themselves out of a future that they had chosen for themselves.
Complicated.
So let’s tie this back to futures work, which often emphasises participation, imagination, and agency. The thing is that many people experience change in quite differently, perhaps even in the opposite way: as something decided elsewhere, delivered without consent, and framed as inevitable. Think about climate change, or geopolitical changes, or war arriving at your doorstep, or biodiversity loss, as examples.
In these situations, it’s easy for people to feel hopeless, to become apathetic. And yet, I think that hope is precisely what we need to facilitate in situations like these. And when I talk about hope, I am not talking about believing everything will turn out well. Instead, I see hope in this context as something that people still feel they have a meaningful role in shaping what comes next, and that they can translate that into action, however small, to be part of an active change.
Facilitating futures, for me, involves paying attention to this gap, the one between futures imagined in strategy rooms and futures lived by people asked to adapt to them.