What we can know about the future: necessity, probability, possibility in Futures Studies

Abstract

In these years of technological acceleration, an ambiguous utopia is making its way back into contemporary culture: the idea that the new conquests of artificial intelligence, big data analytics and quantum computing will soon allow us to significantly improve our forecasting capacity, to the point of realising Laplace's dream of a machine capable of knowing all future instants from the analysis of present data. In order to highlight the fallacies of this returning positivist discourse on the future, it is necessary to use the same tools on which it claims to be based, namely the assumption of measurability, certainty and determinism.