Robert Bunge is Faculty Coordinator for Information Technology at North Seattle College and a member of the Life Itself Research Collective. His talk is adapted from a recent faculty presentation and from chapters of an open-source text he’s writing on “AI and Futurism.”
Robert presents a set of “historical design patterns” for thinking about the future: exponential growth (technology, population, capital), historical cycles and collapse dynamics, the technology hype cycle, “limits to growth” and planetary boundaries, dialectical reversals, and emergence.
He frames forecasting as a toolkit: superforecasting and other methods (visionary forecasts, Delphi, wisdom of crowds, regression, complexity/chaos frameworks like Cynefin, and action-learning loops).
The group discussion probes key tensions—especially whether growth can continue versus whether ecological and material constraints force contraction, and how to interpret conflicting “guru” predictions (e.g., tech optimism versus energy/environmental realism).
