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Nick Foster is not a fan of how Silicon Valley imagines the future. As a designer and writer who has spent his career at places like Google, Nokia, and Sony, he’s had a front-row seat to the tech world’s relentless obsession with turning science fiction into science fact. The problem, he argues, is that the source material was never meant to be a manual for reality.
“The primary function of science fiction is to explore ideas and to entertain. It shouldn’t be considered a brief,” Foster tells me. He worries when he hears people in meetings say, “We should make the thing from Minority Report.” To him, it’s a lazy shortcut—an idea taken from a cinematic universe built for drama, not for pragmatic, human-centred utility.
“They’re sort of misreading the function of that art form,” he says. “They’re just trying to make something happen because they’re excited by it, not necessarily because it’s better or more pragmatic or more useful.”
Foster, the author of Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future, has a more than a few thoughts on what does make for good futurism.
“What I’m trying to do…is not create a method or a framework. We’ve got enough of those,” he explains.
Instead, he offers a simple yet powerful vocabulary to dissect the ways we approach the future, arguing that humans tend to fall into one of four modes of thinking, often without realizing it. To break free of the Silicon Valley narrative, he says, requires changing the way we think about the future of technology.
Foster’s first mode of futurism is Could futurism. This is the one we know best. It’s the futurism of opportunity, of “amazing gadgets, humanoid robots,” and breathtaking architecture. It’s the world of flashy tech demos, driven by a modernist belief in endless progress. Its weakness, however, is that it has been “absolutely co-opted by science fiction,” creating dazzling but ultimately alienating visions that feel disconnected from our lives and the messy path to get there.
Then comes Should futurism. This is the future as a fixed destination. It’s the world of master plans, and of religions and laws that point us toward a desired state. It’s also the world of corporate strategists and their algorithmic projections—the confident dotted lines on charts that declare what’s coming. The obvious flaw, Foster says, is its brittleness. “The world is way more volatile than we think it is,” he warns. “All of our algorithmic projections and our dotted lines on charts are just stories. And often we’re way off.”
As a reaction, Might futurism offers the opposite: a future of infinite scenarios. This is the domain of strategic foresight consultants, born from Cold War-era wargaming at the RAND Corporation. It’s a pluralistic view that maps out every possibility within a “futures cone.” But it has a fatal flaw. “Our imagination about future scenarios is actually based on the past,” Foster notes. This is why companies like Blockbuster could run countless scenarios and still never imagine a future where they weren’t dominant—until it happened.
Finally, there is Don’t futurism, a mode that is gaining momentum in our anxious times. This is the future as a terrifying place to be avoided, the focus of protest movements campaigning against climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, or runaway AI. It is the future as a warning. While essential, its challenge is that it often “protests from the outside” and struggles to offer integrated, actionable paths forward. “It’s quite difficult to deliver a don’t in a helpful way,” Foster says, noting it can become strident and divisive.
The West’s default mode of futurism, Foster argues, is an unbalanced mix of these mindsets. But the tech industry, in particular, is overwhelmingly biased toward could futurism, driven by the commercial need to generate excitement and create market trends. Silicon Valley is blinded by sci-fi dreams, and its attitude towards the future gets worsened by Wall Street's demand for growth.
This stands in stark contrast to China’s approach, a country that understands future planning in a way the West cannot. Beijing just concluded the Chinese Communist Party’s fourth plenary session in October, during which it outlined a 2026-2030 five-year plan, the next-to-last chapter in their decades-long overarching plan to become a leading superpower by 2035.
Foster points out that while Western democracies are trapped in short cycles—” it’s the midterms and then it’s the quarterly results and then it’s the next election”—China’s autocratic system allows it to plan on a generational scale. “In a sort of autocratic dictatorship where you sort of have a dynastic leadership, you can start to think at 10, 15, 20, 30 generational scales,” he observes.
While acknowledging the immense human and societal cost, Foster identifies China’s strategy as a powerful, real-world example of Should futurism. The government establishes a clear destination for the country and then commits all its resources to reaching it. This gives them a stability that the West lacks.
Quoting William Gibson, Foster notes you need a solid place to stand to imagine the future. “China don’t seem to have that problem,” he tells me. “They’re very comfortable with where they want to be. And they seem to be working very hard to get there.”
In our conversation, Foster didn’t offer a way for the West to achieve what China is already doing. In his book, his proposed solution to fixing our vision of the future is a cultural and intellectual one, aimed at leaders within organisations, especially in technology. He believes the crucial shift is for leaders to start communicating in a more balanced way, using all four modes of his framework.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesus Diaz is a screenwriter and producer whose latest work includes the mini-documentary series Control Z: The Future to Undo, the futurist daily Novaceno, and the book The Secrets of Lego House.
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