Peter Adamson

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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

I often thought about that is like when you look at a futurologist, you s you feel like you're like you're Superman and they're bizarro or vice versa.

And this weird funhouse mirror version of what you're you think you're trying to do.

And I had that feeling all the time when

and writing the book as well as the strange time loop of, you know, thinking about the

past of the future in its present.

So it was tricky in that way.

But I think the way I would frame it is that the political problem of complexity itself has become the thing to manage and that

what we've been seeing is a lot of overly simplistic claims, not just about the future but about the present, as a way of trying to address people's concerns about mass unpredictability, but that the

price that's been paid in that political set of developments is a dramatic underestimation of the import ongoing importance of expertise in her entity about your work on second order expertise and how you know which experts to trust.

So your book Don't think for yourself, you know, if you can that was actually very influential on me and m the when I was writing my conclusion to a Century Tomorrow's.

And I think what we really need to do

is remind ourselves that although futurology still has a lot of limitations,

when y you have consensus in futurology as with anything else, it really makes sense to understand

That there is an explanatory power there.

So just in the same way that it would make sense for a farmer to listen to a meteorologist in the 1850s.

It makes sense for everybody to be listening to climate change scientists now, for example.

And so what we mustn't do is allow or sometimes bemused and sometimes appalled understanding of this whole history that I've laid out, this rejectory futurology, allow us to give up on the

project of trying to understand the future.

We need to be more skeptical about it, probably than people were certainly in the lead up to the Vietnam War, just to take one example.

But we also need to have enough confidence in the inherent necessity of futurology to be able to work it successfully into our systems.

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