Peter Adamson

speaker

1,322 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard yesterday

Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps · Bonus Episode: Glenn Adamson on A Century of Tomorrows · 16 Aug 2026 podcast

That's not so much a danger as it is the objective.

So if you're a trend forecaster and the earlier ones were able

Yeah.

You can literally make self fulfilling prophecies, as you say, because if you say that a a st uh a certain colour is going to be in style, then it will be because you have said it.

And so there is a real kind of recursive dynamic to futurology, especially when it's emerging in a new field and you don't have too many voices competing.

And this sort of anticipates where the argument will go towards the end of the twentieth century and why futurology starts to become less effective and less impressive.

What happens is that futurologists start to compete with one another.

And so it starts to become a marketplace like any other and therefore less predictable and it loses its effectiveness.

So if we move into the middle of the century now, one of the chapters in the book is called The Machine.

And this presumably goes together what with what you were saying about using technology to engage in futurology.

Yeah.

So I use metaphors as the chapter titles and one as the machine, partly because it occurred to me that there are

conceptual models of the future that are operative and the way that you think about the future.

tells you a lot about your commitments in the present.

So a really good example of this is machine thinking, as I call it, which has to do with building a model of the future that operates in a mechanistic fashion.

And the key thin here is that a machine, once you get it going, doesn't require any human input.

And so it just goes and thereby eliminates a lot of

eccentricity or failure in predictability in a word, unpredictability that you have in a human system.

And a really great example of this aesthetic, if I could call that in action, is the Futurama at the nineteen thirty nine Worlds Fair, which is maybe the most famous architectural project ever based around futurology.

It was designed for General Motors by a

Showing 441–460 of 1,322 · page 23 of 67