In the wild and wooly world of thinking about futures for the earth, its living forms, and humanity there exists a tier of well know public intellectuals. I prompted 5 different GPT engines (Google Gemini, ChatGPT 4o, Anthropic Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot) to "Please act as an author who has chosen a list of the 10 most influential futurists - public intellectuals who speculate about the future of humanity. Write a brief essay describing each of them and and their basic messages"
The names selected by more than one of the GPT engines were: Ray Kurzweil (5), Michio Kaku (5), Yuval Harari (4), Alvin Toffler (4), Nick Bostrom (3), Aubrey de Grey (3), William Gibson (2), Faith Popcorn (2), and Paul Roberts (2). The names chosen by only one of the engines were Peter Schwartz, Juan Enriquez, Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis, Kevin Kelly, Jane McGonigal, James Lovelock, Ari Wallach, Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, Jacque Fresco, Donna Haraway, Hans Rosling, Paul Roberts, Jaron Lanier. Christopher Alberg, Dirk Helbing, and John Naisbitt.
My own favorite futurist has been Venkatesh Rao, a brilliant polymath whose ideas I have passed on in numerous MindBlog posts (see Ribbonfarm for his narratives) . He is one of a cohort of younger thinkers ~50 years old generating their own newsletters and websites that I have stumbled onto recently. These include Canadian Patrick Tanguary (Sentiers newsletter , Samuel Arbesman's site and its 'lists of lists', Parag Khanna and Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress). I would encourage MindBlog readers to check out a few of these links.
