Futurist

Futurists or futurologists are scientists and social scientists whose specialty is futurology, or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present, whether that of human society in particular or of life on Earth in general.

Definition

The term "futurist" most commonly refers to people such as authors, consultants, organizational leaders and others who engage in interdisciplinary and systems thinking to advise private and public organizations on such matters as diverse global trends, possible scenarios, emerging market opportunities and risk management. (Futurist is not in the sense of the art movement futurism.)

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the earliest use of the term futurism in English as 1842, to refer, in a theological context, to the Christian eschatological tendency of that time. The next recorded use is the label adopted by the Italian and Russian futurists, the artistic, literary and political movements of the 1920s and 1930s which sought to reject the past and fervently embrace speed, technology and, often violent, change.

Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal (born October 21, 1977) is an American game designer and author who advocates the use of mobile and digital technology to channel positive attitudes and collaboration in a real world context.

Biography

Early years

McGonigal was brought up in New Jersey. Her parents are teachers and emphasized intellectual attainment. She has an identical twin sister, Kelly McGonigal.

Studies

McGonigal received her BA in English from Fordham University in 1999, and her PhD in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006.

Personal life

After earning her BA in English, she started developing her first commercial games. In 2006, at the age of 28, she earned a PhD in performance studies and continued developing games. In 2009, she suffered a debilitating concussion that helped her in the development of a game, Jane the Concussion Slayer, for treating her concussion and other similar conditions. The game was later renamed SuperBetter. In 2011, her first book was published. Her sister Kelly is a psychologist and also an author.

Ray Kurzweil

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/ˈkɜːrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first charge-coupled device flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.