Miejsce realizacji: Wydział Filozofii i Socjologii (Aula )
Adres: Lublin, Plac Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej 4

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed” said William Gibson, widely known as the creator of the 1984 best-selling novel "Neuromancer", creator of "cyberpunk" and the concept of "cyberspace".

In this way, the author referred to his method of predicting what the world would look like in the future: based on careful observation of what it looked like back then. The fact that his method is effective is evidenced by the fact that in 1984, when PCs were just beginning to conquer the world, when no one could think about cyberspace, virtual reality, global network, etc. Gibson published a book perfectly describing  the modern world.

Observing the present to predict the future is not just the domain of literature. In my presentation, I would like to draw attention to the interest in the future and the struggle with it not only by science fiction authors, but most of all – by modern science.

The analysis will be presented mainly from the perspective of sociology as a scientific discipline, as one of the main challenges at the time of its emergence was to forecast changes, enabling the management of the progress of society in a scientific and rational manner.

It was not difficult to learn that the possibilities of science in this respect are limited, but there are still attempts at improving tools for insight into the future – the methodology of foresight research is developing, specialized institutes and disciplines of research on the future (the so-called future studies) and new advanced technological tools allowing to make more and more accurate calculations and forecasts are being established.

In the presentation, I will try to show what the method of scientific forecasting and creating future scenarios has in common with the method used by contemporary science fiction authors. The changing possibilities of science in this field will also be presented, and at the end, together with the participants of the lecture, we will try to answer the question to what extent such forecasts and scenarios (scientific and literary) not only predict, but – by shaping ideas – they create the future as "self-fulfilling prophecies".