{"id":244544,"date":"2026-09-27T09:02:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T14:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/nikolas-badminton-on-facing-our-futures-futurism-is-activism"},"modified":"2026-09-27T09:02:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T14:02:25","slug":"nikolas-badminton-on-facing-our-futures-futurism-is-activism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/nikolas-badminton-on-facing-our-futures-futurism-is-activism","title":{"rendered":"Nikolas Badminton on Facing Our Futures: Futurism is Activism"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNostalgia is the greatest threat to futurist thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Three and a half years later, that line reads less like an observation and more like a diagnosis. Look at how much of today\u2019s #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.<\/p>\n

Nik\u2019s answer is blunt. Futurism is activism. If you don\u2019t imagine the future you want, someone else will imagine it for you, and you won\u2019t like their version.<\/p>\n

We spent 90 minutes on why he calls himself a hope engineer, the poverty of our imagination, why Silicon Valley\u2019s \u201csingular\u201d future is a trap, and a framework from his book Facing Our Futures that deliberately walks you into dystopia first. I didn\u2019t expect where it ends up.<\/p>\n

One more line from him I still think about:<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u201cNikolas Badminton on Facing Our Futures: Futurism is Activism\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNostalgia is the greatest threat to futurist thinking.\u201d 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 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,1878,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-employment","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}