As an award-winning senior journalist at BBC Future and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT from 2019–20, Richard Fisher has drawn together the disparate strands of serious long-termism and deep future thinking in society – the researchers, artists, technologists, philosophers and others – and corrals the resulting concepts into comprehensive and compelling articles. His blog, The Long-termist’s Field Guide, is the first stop for anyone getting to grips with deep time, the long now and even the idea of ‘slow violence’.
In an inspiring piece written for BBC Future in 2019, Fisher laid out a compelling argument for thinking past the next term of office, the next quarter, the next news cycle – even the next few minutes – for the good of humanity and made the case for how short-termism is a direct threat to our survival. He illustrates this with extraordinary prescience using the hypothetical case of a newly elected leader putting pandemic preparation to one side, because of cost-benefit analysis.
We have yet to find clearer or more persuasive arguments for the importance of long-term thinking than Fisher’s elucidations on the subject. We count him as a valued friend of the 2269 project and he is welcomed with open arms to the Greatest Party of All Time. His upcoming book, The Long View, is out in 2023.
"Our inability to look beyond the latest news cycle could be one of the most dangerous traits of our generation.”
Richard Fisher
Learn more