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What Should A Futurologist Call Himself? Let’s face it, ‘futurologist’ is a ludicrous job title. Have can you have an ‘ology’ – a science or a logic – when it applies to the future? It seems to be as much a contradiction in terms – an oxymoron – as ‘military intelligence’ or ‘European harmony’. The main reason why I use the term ‘futurologist’ about myself is that it allows me to draw a parallel between our lack of a good word for somebody who studies the future and our lack of language with which to describe and think our new technology when it first arrives. Another problem with the term ‘futurologist’ is that the uninitiated confuse it with ‘astrology’ and other forms of fortune telling. For most people the term ‘futurologist’ equals ‘charlatan’ which is unfortunate, to say the least. In the United States the term in common use for someone who studies the future is ‘futurist’ (although Alvin Toffler separated himself from his colleagues by insisting on ‘futurologist’). But I think the suffix ‘ist’ or ‘ism’ implies a belief in the future itself, which may be unwarranted. Of course, futurologists and futurists don’t actually study the future. We study present trends in detail in order to decide which of them may have a powerful force on developments in the future. Some trends such as world population growth and the looming energy crisis are easy to spot. Others prove more difficult and discerning how trends may interact with each other in the future is the most difficult thing of all. The term ‘futurologist’ was first used by the British writer Aldous Huxley in 1947 when he was writing to a friend and describing the work on which he was engaged. It’s a shame My Huxley was careless (or perhaps he was being flip). He had thought more deeply about what he was doing he would have coined the term ‘futurographer’ (from the Greek ‘graph’, to write) which would have been a far more accurate description of what he was doing. In fact, ‘Futurographer’ also describes precisely what I do. I wonder if I can change my job title at this late stage? Probably not. Ends
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