One day last September, a curious email arrived in Chris Hables Gray’s inbox. An author and self-described anarchist, feminist, and revolutionary, Gray fits right into Santa Cruz, Calif., where he lives. He’s written extensively about genetic engineering and the inevitable rise of cyborgs, attending protests in between for causes such as Black Lives Matter.While Gray had taken some consulting gigs over the years, he’d never received an offer like this one. The first shock was the money: significantly more than he’d earned from all but one of his books. The second was the task: researching the aesthetics of seminal works of science fiction such as Blade Runner. The biggest surprise, however, was the ultimate client: Mohammed bin Salman, the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

Future vertigo gives way to future fatigue

Ultimately there rises the familiar suspicion that, for a country in love with the future, it’s always yesterday in America.

The eyes of the Fair are on the future—not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow

It was the first exposition to be based on the future, with an opening slogan of "Dawn of a New Day", and it allowed all visitors to take a look at "the world of tomorrow".

With side-by-side displays, the never-built Memex desk would have let a user compare and create links between microfilm documents.

Researcher Alan Kay, believing “the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” mocked up a wirelessly connected tablet-like computer for kids in 1968. His “dynamic book,” or Dynabook, was among the most influential computers never built.

But the academic experience could be continually refined and improved with the level of obsession that a company like Apple puts into improving every aspect of their customer experience.

There are two polar opposite narratives about the future of higher education that are both gaining traction at the moment.

I believe that the bulk of institutions that will truly succeed going forward will not be those that win online, but on the contrary, those that do a good job establishing, maintaining, and conveying unique local experiences. Schools must reach inward to provide rich, meaningful, lasting, engaged experiences for their constituencies so people come, stay, and come back. Online, we call this “stickiness” and that will be EDU’s new metric for success: how sticky are you?

Next I’ll offer some reflections.

In other words, what might the world look like if the pandemic continues at around the present level for several years?

For as science fiction writer William Gibsonacutely observes, the future does not arrive all at onceeverywhere

we are simultaneously living along two curves

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Re-lease

jump-start a sputtering capitalism

In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.