Institute for the Future

Over the first few months of 2026, a new worker archetype has emerged in tech companies as they reorganize around AI. It's the High-Impact Individual Contributor — or the "HI-C," a term coined by Elena Verna, head of growth at Lovable, a software development platform.

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Making good choices about what we do next is the purpose of foresight. In this issue, Jane McGonigal's Lumisphere essay shows how an immersive futures-thinking experience produced measurable shifts in mental flexibility, realistic hope, agency, and openness to possibility. This October's IFTF Ten-Year Forecast Summit is titled, "What We Choose Next." We will explore ten high-probability futures, from the loneliness business to a world reorganized around extreme heat.

In 2050, expectant parents enter their soccer club's stadium to give birth. A crowd of fans waits on the benches. Screens broadcast each newborn's name, time of birth, and image mapped onto the club's soccer ball, marking induction into the fandom. This was Birth Sanctuary — a scene my group built during the IFTF Experiential Futures Training in July 2025, taught by Jake Dunagan and Jacques Barcia.

Natalie Foster is a co-founder of the Economic Security Project, author of The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America's Next Economy (The New Press, 2024), and a former IFTF Future for Good Fellow. This year, she joined IFTF's board of directors. IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis spoke with Foster in April 2024, just before The Guarantee was published, for IFTF's Future Now podcast.

When I first started using the phrase urgent optimism, I was trying to describe a feeling that shows up in games. It’s the moment when players realize that the challenge in front of them is big — maybe even overwhelming — but also solvable. There’s work to do. The clock is ticking. But the outcome is not predetermined. What happens next depends on what we do.

In 2025, the Gender Equality Index ranked Romania 23rd among the 27 EU countries, far below the EU average. Despite some progress in gender disparities the country has made in the past decade, there is still work to be done to improve the state of Romania’s gender equality. How might futures thinking hasten Romania’s journey to a more equitable future?

In 2024 we found ourselves at the edge of the “uncanny valley” — a state of unease triggered by entities that appear almost, but not quite, human. In a world where AI chatbots mimic human conversation with unsettling accuracy, and deep fakes challenge our perception of reality. Daily, we're thrust into increasingly unfamiliar territory as technological revolutions, geopolitical shifts, and climate change reshape our world.

Three of the ten forecasts examine what it means to know, to learn, and to trust in a decade when AI is embedded in almost every act of judgment. Together they ask: Discernment. When seeing-is-believing collapses, what becomes the new heuristic for trust — and who is trained to teach it? The Future of Scientific Knowledge. If generative systems can produce plausible findings and fake citations on demand, how do researchers rebuild knowledge that holds up? Four Cultures of AI.

In 2024, criminals used a deepfake video to impersonate a CFO and drain $25 million from a company. Reddit now requires suspicious accounts to prove they are human. Released today from the 2025 IFTF Ten-Year Forecast series is Nathalie Lopez's "The Human Verification Crisis," which describes a world where distinguishing real from fake becomes impossible without reliable systems to verify who's actually a human in online interactions.