Futurist

Futurists, or futurologists, are those who speculate about the future. The Oxford English Dictionary traces earliest English usage of the term 'futurist' to 1842, referring to Christian scriptural futurists. The next usage occurs with the Italian and Russian Futurists of the early 20th century (1900s-1930s), an artistic, literary, and political movement that sought to reject the past and rather uncritically embraced speed, technology, and violent... more

Futurists, or futurologists, are those who speculate about the future. The Oxford English Dictionary traces earliest English usage of the term 'futurist' to 1842, referring to Christian scriptural futurists. The next usage occurs with the Italian and Russian Futurists of the early 20th century (1900s-1930s), an artistic, literary, and political movement that sought to reject the past and rather uncritically embraced speed, technology, and violent change. Curiously, early modern visionary authors like Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy, and even H.G. Wells were not characterized as futurists in their day, but rather as philosophers of foresight, a closely related term. The use of futurist and its synonym futurologist in the modern context of thinking about and analyzing the future began in the mid-1940s, when German professor Ossip K. Flechtheim coined the term futurology and proposed it as a new science of probability. Flechtheim argued that even if systematic forecasting did no more than... less