Futuribles - Veille, prospective, stratégie

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia on 24 February 2022 smashed head-on into a convalescent world weakened by the Covid 19 pandemic. The short and decisive “special operation” the Russian regime had imagined ground to a halt in the face of Ukrainian resistance, forcing the two states into an extended war. The uncertainties this conflict raises about the future are many and varied. They deserve to be considered using a systemic foresight approach to reflect on the trajectories that might ...

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Futuribles International: Who we are…

Futuribles International is a centre for foresight thinking and studies which aims to effectively integrate a sense of the long-term into decision-making and action. Since 1960, Futuribles has played a leading role in the development of foresight studies in France and throughout the world. #Foresight #Thinktank #Prospective

Most of the articles published in Futuribles are in French. The English version of our website is about to be upgraded.

In the meantime, we advise you to go to the French version in order to access our publications (click on top right corner).

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Vigie 2020 Report - Summary

The executive summary of the Vigie 2020 Report, as well as the cartography of possible discontinuities and shocks to 2040-2050 have been translated into English. You can download the summary in English below.

Revue

Économie, emploi - Recherche, sciences, techniques - Société, modes de vie

Artificial Intelligence : Opportunities and Risks

For some time now, artificial intelligence (AI) has been receiving unprecedented attention. Why is this? Because it is making a genuine leap forward as a combined result of four factors: the rapid advance in communications that sends all forms of expression hurtling across the planet at the speed of light, computer processing power (now measured in quadrillions of operations per second), the explosion of available data and the progress of machine learning. Hence, as André-Yves Portnoff and Jean-François Soupizet assert ...

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Ressources naturelles, énergie, environnement - Territoires, réseaux

Agriculture, Land, Water and Climate

The rise in the ecological vote in the second round of the French municipal elections (even though this should be kept in perspective due to low turnouts) is no doubt revealing about the growing preoccupation of our contemporaries with environmental questions — particularly global warming and biodiversity loss, a concern also attested by most studies on the ‘post-Covid world’. Should such preoccupations immediately be seen as part of the trend in favour of economic de-growth? That is not the view of ...

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Éducation - Recherche, sciences, techniques

Cognitive Biases : Between Necessity and Danger

Still as part of the series on the brain begun in this issue of Futuribles, Pascale Toscani, in the introduction to her article, raises a familiar question: why do we have to think before replying to a question that is put to us? The answer, she explains, is that “our brain works before us, before the information arrives in our consciousness,” because it is endowed with a capacity for anticipation based on everything it has registered in the past. But ...

Bibliography

Recherche, sciences, techniques - Territoires, réseaux

La Clé USB

Les Éditions de minuit, 2019

Followers of Futuribles ought to enjoy The USB Key, the new novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. It is set against the backdrop of foresight and futures work, and even features the Futuribles’ former offices. The hero of the novel, Jean Detrez, is a strategic foresight specialist at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Brussels. His backstory: before becoming an EU official, he worked in the 1990s as an editor at the journal Futuribles. He was based in our Paris ...

Bibliography

Économie, emploi - Territoires, réseaux

France’s territories, challenges and promises

L’Aube, 2019

With “La France des territoires, défis et promesses” (France's territories, challenges and promises), Pierre Veltz offers a stimulating prospective analysis. By anchoring it in the long term and drawing on his in-depth knowledge of socio-economic transformations, particularly those concerning globalisation and ‘hyperindustrialisation’, he deconstructs many of the misconceptions that clutter public debate and manages to articulate France's political challenges in new terms. His hypothesis is that we are witnessing a local turning point which, if well negotiated, could ...

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Économie, emploi - Géopolitique - Santé

Covid-19 crisis : possible scenarios for the next 18 months

Thanks to its knowledge of rigorous forward-thinking methodologies, Futuribles International Association has set out 11 scenarios to forecast the possible evolutions of the crisis over the next 18 months (the targeted horizon being the end of 2021). These scenarios, built using the tools of morphological analysis, are available on three scales: the global, the European and the French.

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