Peter Adamson

speaker

1,322 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 2d ago

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

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

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

conflict, climate change, economic catastrophe, migration, that these all interact in ways that are so

wildly volatile that we just don't have a an understanding of how they're going to affect one another.

And moreover, the more that we know about them, the less that we feel we know what to do because the

the factors are in literally incalculable.

And moreover, at the same time that this is happening, you also have the problem that the ranks of futurologists have now swelled to the point where it's actually difficult to distinguish between futurology and people who just work in a company and have the other.

Respect.

So anybody in a marketing department, anybody in the design department, engineering, technology supply, certainly the CEO and CFO, they're all futurologists now.

Because if they're not applying these techniques of prediction and calculation and risk management, then they're not doing their jobs.

So whereas you used to have a very small number of people who presented themselves to you almost as gurus, now it's just become part of the everyday

Fabric of business as usual, and yet at the same time there's a pervasive sense of crisis.

So, you know, the difficulty becomes a matter of not so much defining expertise as maybe a a feeling that expertise is no longer equal to the level of complexity that society has generated for itself.

So maybe just la one last question.

Would you say that's where we are now?

Are we still deep at sea within this flood?

Or are things changed since the end of the twentieth century in an appreciable way?

Yeah.

It's a great question and one that I tend to shy away from as a historian rather than a contemporary political commentator.

Yeah, by the way, we're both historians, the opposite of futurologists.

Yeah.

That's why we find this so interesting.

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