The Age of Unthinkable Futures

The essay starts from a simple problem: foresight methods built around continuity are weakest exactly where discontinuity matters most. Probability can organise what is already imaginable, but it cannot fully account for what sits outside the conceptual frame from which those probabilities are constructed.

The proposed response is not better prediction. It is greater epistemic agility: questioning the frameworks we rely on, using speculative design to stretch the space of the thinkable, and working with AI as a generator of unfamiliar possibilities rather than only as an extrapolation engine.

In other words: train for futures that cannot be derived neatly from the present.