Around this Christmas, I received review copies of Visions of the Future and other important Lifeboat Foundation books.

Primarily collections of essays authored by other Lifeboat Foundation members (compare to my own main futurist work, the pocket-size Catalyst thesis that you can read in a day) those books can be immense and cover a wide variety of topics. As a result, my reviews will be directed mainly at a smaller selection of authors and essayists who contributed to these books at the Foundation.

My futurism focuses on the idea that science and technology have a great responsibility not just for what they do but for what they fail to do. They should not be used to the exclusive benefit of one nation-state or a few, but should uplift the entire globe. It is an accepted aspect of enlightenment, the highest cosmopolitan virtue, to believe that the lives and pleasures of my neighbour or I are no more important than those of anyone else anywhere else in the world.

Unless the benefits of science and technology are duly and equally shared among all people, with maximum attention to decentralisation and the equal treatment of all states and cultures, these benefits ought not to be recognised at all. I would then offer no futurist vision other than to say the future is lost. In fact, most so-called benefits would only in fact be supporting hegemony, poverty and injustice and further bloating the sense of legitimacy of a privileged few if they were not adequately or promptly circulated.

This idea of total equality in human development is central to my Catalyst thesis and it is central to my recent post about thermonuclear fusion energy. It can be expected to inform my upcoming book reviews of those immense collected works sent to me by the think tank this Christmas.