Jamais Cascio

Jamais Cascio has worked as a futurist for over three decades, but he usually refers

to himself as an “easily distracted generalist.” He has given talks about deepfakes

to the Arab Media Forum, the politics of geoengineering to the US National

Academies of Science, and the possibility of hope amid global chaos to the World

Bank. He’s written and spoken around the world about the ethics of cognitive

enhancement, the carbon footprint of cheeseburgers, and the critical need to deal

with climate change. He explored the disruptive potential of networked mobile

cameras (i.e., mobile phones) in his work three years before the iPhone came out.

A nuclear policy NGO twice sought him out to write scenarios of the future of

global security.

Jamais worked as a computer network administrator and as a (paper and

dice) game designer. He spent a couple of years in Hollywood as an adviser for

science fiction television shows and was the lead writer for an award-winning

climate and culture blog back when there were blogs. He’s appeared in enough

television and film documentaries to warrant his own IMDb page. Foreign Policy

magazine listed him as one of their Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009; the

University of Advancing Technology awarded him an honorary doctorate of

science (ScD) in 2017.

He’s chatted with Al Gore about the animated series Futurama and with

Michio Kaku about the possibility of “boiling space-time.” He was name-checked

in an issue of the Avengers comic book. He’s actually touched a moon rock.

The Institute for the Future has had him in their network long enough to

consider him a Distinguished Fellow. He created BANI as a way of talking about

the future of trust and international power for an IFTF event. It turns out that being

an easily distracted generalist is the perfect training for working as a futurist.

Jamais has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology (focusing on evolution) and

history (focusing on revolutions). He did his graduate work in international

politics, although he wrote his master’s thesis on consociational democracy in

Lebanon. He never got around to finishing his actual PhD.

Amid all of this, he’s had one constant: Janice Cripe, his wife of thirty-

three years, along with their cats.