“Nostalgia is the greatest threat to futurist thinking.”

My friend Nikolas Badminton said that to me in February 2023. ChatGPT was ten weeks old. Most people were still arguing about whether it was a toy.

Three and a half years later, that line reads less like an observation and more like a diagnosis. Look at how much of today’s #AI conversation is really about yesterday: protecting old jobs, old institutions, old business models, old ideas of what a human is for. We have the most powerful tools in history, and we keep pointing them backward.

Nik’s answer is blunt. Futurism is activism. If you don’t imagine the future you want, someone else will imagine it for you, and you won’t like their version.

We spent 90 minutes on why he calls himself a hope engineer, the poverty of our imagination, why Silicon Valley’s “singular” future is a trap, and a framework from his book Facing Our Futures that deliberately walks you into dystopia first. I didn’t expect where it ends up.

One more line from him I still think about:

Hope is nothing without imagination.

If you work in #foresight or #strategy, or you lead anything at all, it’s worth asking whether you’re building a future or just defending a past.

Watch or listen to my full conversation with Nikolas Badminton here: [ https://snglrty.co/3Xkzx3w](https://snglrty.co/3Xkzx3w)

Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist at futurist.com. See his interview to learn foresight tools and lessons from ‘Facing Our Futures.’