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FARSIGHT

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The quarterly publication that explores possible futures. Published by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (CIFS).

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ON AUTOPILOT - FARSIGHT #18 🤖

Heightening both Promethean excitation and the anxiety surrounding that which it displaces, automation is difficult to reasonably navigate. Ask someone what they think about automation and you’ll probably be surprised by their answer – even if you think you know them quite well. Conventional left-right divides seemingly melt away and new political fault lines are drawn when faced with work’s erasure through technology.
This issue is concerned with the future of automation as a form of political and economic re-organisation, as well as the concept’s corollaries – the abdication of agency in making things automatic, the existential issues raised by treating machines as automatons, and the alienation experienced through the interplay of these forces when they’re dealt with inadequately. A recurring theme is the importance of negotiating with automation’s future, rather than treating it as a blindly acting force.

Grab a copy by following the link in our bio.

Illustration: @sophia.prieto.v
Editor-in-Chief: Casper Skovgaard Petersen
Editor: August Leo Liljenberg
Contributors: Toke Hanghøj, Sofia Hvitved, Bugge Holm Hansen, Tallulah Richard’s, Casper Skovgaard Petersen, August Leo Liljenberg, Peter Hesseldahl by @cphfutures

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4 months ago

Sneak Peek of our new issue: Problem of the Future. To be released on 15/10. 🌱

In an era mediated through code, ‘trend’ has become an earworm of digital culture, lumped in with virality and consumerism.

Is there a way out of the feedback loop, in which ‘trending’ is confused with tangible change, and towards reclaiming the analytical value of the term?

Written by Tallulah Richards

👉Read the article by clicking the link in bio! by @cphfutures

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19 days ago

In Praise of Folly ☄️

The history of ideas is a history of error. Prominent scientists once believed people lived on the surface of suns - a view we now find absurd. But folly comes in many forms, and its history may be less a catalogue of embarrassments than an unlikely guide to far we have yet to go.

Read the full article by clicking the link in bio 🌞

Author: Thomas Moynihan by @cphfutures

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a month ago

‘Have We Enslaved the Machines?’ asks FARSIGHT editor August Liljenberg in our latest issue.

The 20th century French philosopher Gilbert Simondon believed that humankind harbours a primitive and xenophobic attitude to the technologies it creates. Today, we are surrounded by conversations about acceleration and automation, with the philosopher’s thought offering a uniquely provocative take on alienation in the future

Link in bio to read (or listen) to the full article 👉

Illustration: @sophia.prieto.v by @cphfutures

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a month ago

Enslaved to the mechanical idea? ⚙️⚙️⚙️

Writing from his sprawling Salzburg Villa in 1925, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig cautioned of a conquest of Europe by America, identifying the intoxicating and homogenising nature of its imported “mechanical idea” as something “profoundly foreign to Europe”.

101 years later, in 2026, the polemic seems particularly prophetic, especially to those who disparage European reliance on US technology. Concerns span from lopsided infrastructure ownership patterns and the politicising impact of social media to more existential concerns regarding the consequences of AI on human agency and cognition. The ideological gulf across the Atlantic has never seemed so expansive or politically charged, which only serves to add to European anxieties.

Read the article 👉 Link in bio

Author: Tallulah Richards by @cphfutures

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2 months ago

THE SLOPCONOMY AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

In the Spring of 2026, a paper published by the MIT Sloan School caused a bit of a stir among those who take an interest in the long-term economic implications of artificial intelligence. Most economic models, the paper’s authors argue, misunderstand AI completely by not paying sufficient attention to the bottleneck that decides its true potential – human beings.

Whether or not we can build a truly automated and augmented future depends less on the evolution of machine intelligence, and more on the ability of humans and machines to achieve a kind of symbiotic alignment. Someone needs to check and audit the output of AI, and these capabilities are embodied, built up over time, and difficult to synthesize. Our finite capacity to validate and underwrite machine work complicates the idea of an imminent economic AGI revolution while also highlighting the plausible counter scenario: a slop future where understaffed firms drown in endless piles of useless machine work.

FARSIGHT’s Editor-in-Chief, Casper Skovgaard Petersen, spoke to one of the paper’s authors, Christian Catalini, to learn more. Catalini is the Founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab and a Research Scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Read the full article 👉 Link in bio

Illustration: Sophia Prieto @sophia.prieto.v by @cphfutures

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2 months ago

On chat-shaming…

“Shame, for the lack of a better word, is good.”

Have you ever caught yourself removing em-dashes and wellknown trigger words that give away the fact that a text comes from AI and contains nothing of you?

As generative AI disrupts the balance between effort and reward in writing and creativity, shame nevertheless remains at work, as a hidden mechanism of social control.

Large language models are not unique in how they eliminate the barriers to what used to require arduous effort. Since GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro became widely available, the equilibrium of effort and reward associated with exercise and weight loss has similarly been permanently disrupted.

In this article from the latest FARSIGHT, Toke Hanghøj explores the friction between the pious ideal of virtue of toil and modern society’s need for growth through automation and increased efficiency.

He argues that shame acts as a social shock absorber that lessens the impact of new norms, trends and technologies.

Read the article 👉 Link in bio. by @cphfutures

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3 months ago

“AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs – and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years.”

This inflammatory statement was made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in an interview with Axios in 2025. Although provocative, it is by no means the most controversial prediction regarding the potential near term impact of AI made recently by some of the most influential figures in tech.

At CIFS, we would normally position ourselves above the trenches and insist that we need to produce sensible, balanced, and plausible scenarios free from the biases and incentives that pollute AI discourse. The scenarios would serve as narrative tool, allowing decision makers to picture different future outcomes and prepare more robust decision making.

In this article, we try to do things differently. We will take the predictions at face value and see where it leads us. What if it is true that AI will wipe out 50% of white-collar jobs and spike unemployment in the span of just a few years? If technical progress follows this predicted course, how would the rest of society need to adapt for AI to prove this disruptive? What major decisions, events, and inflection points would need to occur for us to arrive at the future Dario Amodei predicts by say, 2030?

Read (or listen) to the article (and scenario) 👉 Link in bio

Author: Toke Hanghøj
Illustration: Sophia Prieto @sophia.prieto.v by @cphfutures

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3 months ago

What is the neuroscience of futuring? 🧠

Last year, we interviewed neuroscientists Kerstin Preuschoff and Ewa Lombard about the role of optimism and pessimism in shaping future outcomes on both the individual and collective level.

What are the sources of optimism and pessimism, how do they help (or inhibit) foresight, and how might we harness neuroscience to think about the future better?

Read the full article 👉 Link in bio

Kerstin Preuschoff and Ewa Lombard are neuroscientists at the Laboratory for Uncertainty, Collective Intelligence & Decision Making (LUCID) at the University of Geneva.

Author: Casper Skovgaard Petersen by @cphfutures

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4 months ago

FRED POLAK: HISTORY OF THE FUTURE 🎙️🇳🇱🌠

Writing in the ruins of post-war Europe, Dutch futurist Fred Polak argued that societies rise and fall based on the vitality of their images of the future. By that measure, he believed, Western civilization was headed for terminal decline.

In his 1953 masterwork The Image of the Future, Polak traced how magnetic visions of tomorrow, whether religious or revolutionary, had pulled history forward since the ancient Greeks. Without them, he warned, civilizations stagnate and collapse.

Who was Fred Polak, and how well does his sweeping and pessimistic diagnosis of the modern world stand the test of time?

Listen to the full episode 👉 Link in bio

Hosts: Casper Skovgaard Petersen, August Leo Liljenberg, Tallulah Richards by @cphfutures

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4 months ago

WHAT WILL BE OUR NEXT HIGH? 💊

From the utopian ideals of LSD in the sixties to the grunge-infused nihilism of heroin in the nineties, culture and intoxication seem to have always mirrored each other. Might uncovering the nebulous relationship between drug and zeitgeist help us predict what the drug of the future might be?

In this article, FARSIGHT Editor August Liljenberg speaks to cultural historians and pharmacologists, as well as draws from his own experience with inebriation, to investigate the future of intoxication.

“As a universal pillar of social and cultural life, everywhere and throughout all time, intoxication is one of the human activities that strongly reflects the values, anxieties and structures of society.” So writes Stuart Walton, author of A Cultural History of Intoxication. “Its role as a central category of experience reflects the ways in which people seek to amend, or entirely displace, their apprehension of reality.”

...

“If my fourteen-year-old self had been ahead of the curve, he would’ve chosen a drug of the future: a cocktail of Xanax, MDMA-lite, and Ozempic before a digital detox wellness retreat. Even so, the cultural zeitgeists I had identified with drugs of the past could not have been extrapolated into the future. Atomised doomscrollers do not create a homogenous culture, unfortunately, and when they do coalesce, it’s usually to lament the slow erasure of cultural novelty altogether.” - August Liljenberg

Read the full article 👉 Link in Bio

Author: August Liljenberg
Illustration: Juliana Toro by @cphfutures

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5 months ago

Will speed replace sloth as a deadly sin?

Time and technology are inextricably linked. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, doing things slowly, inefficiently, and without precision looks existentially preferable.

Author: Caitlin van Bommel @casitlin

Read the full article 👉 Link in bio

PIC 1: Acedia, by Hieronymous Wierix (in Ancient Greece a state of indifference or carelessness; by early Christian monks, defined as a spiritual state of listlessness)

PIC 2: Sun-dial illustrations by @cphfutures

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6 months ago