Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.
For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.
In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.
Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.
I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.
I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.
In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.
What has made America amazing has been the fact that throughout our history, throughout the more than 200 years of our history, there have been men and women of courage who stood up and decided it was more important to look out for the future of their children and their grandchildren than their own political futures.
In order to counteract income inequality, it's essential to tackle poverty in an integrated way that has long-term impact. We need to give people the capacity to be resilient, to take on challenges and to learn the skills they need to work toward more prosperous futures.
All imaginable futures are not equally possible.