Foresight and the Ability to Foresee Future Events

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In the book we talk about various things like even exchange systems and bartering, contracts are a big part of that. Reliant on foresight, again, because you representing the fact that in the future, you owe me something and I expect to get it back. That might not be for a long period of time between now and then. And so trying to get to grips with how, how to use foresight, especially in terms of its relationship to our technologies is one of the key challenges that we're facing now.

One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that haven’t yet happened. This simple ability underlies our capability to organize socially and make contracts with other people. Today’s guest, psychologist Adam Bulley, argues that it’s the primary feature that makes us recognizably human, as he argues in the new book The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight (with Thomas Suddendorf and Jonathan Redshaw).

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Adam Bulley received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre and School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, and the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

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