The future of data, AI, work and democracy: an interview

This is an interview for the Cypriot newspaper Fileleftheros. The Greek translation can be found in this link. What follows is the original text in English. The interviewer was Xenia Trouki. Let’s start by understanding what a futurist does, including how you go about forecasting. A futurist aims to predict...

Space republics: how to democratise space exploration and accelerate colonisation

I have vivid memories from the hot July night of 1969 when the Eagle landed on the Moon. I was nearly five then. I was woken up[1] and hurried by my parents, still dressed in my pyjamas, to our next-door neighbour who owned one of the very few, black-and-white, television...

Abandoning the metropolis: space colonisation as the new imperative

The year 2019 began with news of the most distant object ever visited by a spaceship and the landing of a probe on the far side of the Moon. On New Year's Day[1] New Horizons, a robotic spaceship launched in 2006, was transmitting photographs of a bizarre, snowman-shaped object called...

Citizen Assemblies: a TEDx talk

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKQmKlxytkI] Do you trust your politicians? The people who represent you, and take decisions on your behalf about vital things, like health, education, national defence, and importantly where your taxes are spent Research data show that trust in politicians is at an all-time low across most liberal democracies. In...

Public Goods, commodities and social contract

Are education or healthcare public goods or commodities? Should the State control education or healthcare, or should it allow market forces to set prices and utilize resources?  Questions such as these seem to beg answers depending on the respondent’s political ideology. Socialists, or statists in general, would argue that they...