Founder Edward Cornish | ||
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Headquarters Chicago, Illinois, United States Similar Humanity+, Foresight Institute, Institute for Ethics and Emerging, Lifeboat Foundation, Singularity University Profiles | ||
The World Future Society (WFS) is a nonprofit educational and scientific organization founded in 1966 and based in Chicago, IL. Annually, WFS reviews the past year in order to make predictions about the future, and each July, WFS holds a conference which features speakers and one- or two-day courses dealing with futures studies. Membership is open to anyone who can afford it and many members are not professional futurists. The society claims that its membership includes sociologists, scientists, corporate planners, educators, students and retirees.
Contents
Chairperson
Julie Friedman Steele 2016–present
Presidents / Executive Director
Julie Friedman Steele 2016–present Amy Zalman 2014-2016 (?) Timothy Mack, Esq. 2004-2014 Ed Cornish 1966-2004
Website
The WFS website features digital library resources about futurism and content from the society's various publications.
Publications
The World Future Society publishes numerous books, including Futuring: The Exploration of the Future (Oct. 2005), written by society founder Edward Cornish, as well as several print and electronic journals.
The Futurist
The Futurist was established in 1967. It was previously a full-color bimonthly magazine and is now an online publication that reports on technological, societal, and public policy trends. The Futurist was nominated for a 2007 Utne Independent Press Award for Best Science and Technology Coverage.
The Futurist has published articles by forecaster and Smart Money columnist Jamais Cascio, NASA chief research scientist Dennis Bushnell, Financial Times economist Martin Wolf, workplace expert John Challenger and Wall Street Journal "Gen X" columnist Alexandra Levit. The magazine published exclusive interviews with former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, serving U.S. congressman Dennis Kucinich, Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, as well as inventor (and World Future 2010 featured speaker) Ray Kurzweil.
The Futurist featured coverage on:
Executive Editors of The Futurist
Edward Cornish (1967-2010); Cynthia G. Wagner (2011-2014); Mark D. Drapeau (2015)
Journals
The World Future Society previously published the academic journal World Future Review. This journal is independent of the society starting with Volume 8.