The Future Human Podcast

Welcome to Visionaries, a podcast dedicated to futurological thinkers brought to you by Future Human and the V&A. We seek out people who are reimagining innovation in their field, and ask them to apply their intelligence to emerging trends.

Cher Potter is a senior editor at the fashion forecasting company WGSN. She analyses sociopolitical and cultural trends and their potential impact on the fashion industry – in essence, predicting probable futures.

How do trend forecasters identify the cultural shifts that shape consumer attitudes? Potter explains how the trend analysts make sense of a complex web of consumer behaviours, and how the narratives they craft manifest themselves in fashion products on the high street. But will trend forecasting services like WGSN see their influence wane as customers and manufacturers source more information online? Presented by Jack Gwilym Roberts.

Welcome to Visionaries, a podcast dedicated to futurological thinkers brought to you by Future Human and the V&A. We seek out people who are reimagining innovation in their field, and ask them to apply their intelligence to emerging trends.

Owen Holland is professor of cognitive robotics at the University of Sussex, where he works to simulate human intelligence in robots. His research similarly focuses on analysing the potential for engineering machine consciousness.

What is consciousness, what does it do and how did it evolve? Professor Holland explains why knowledge of the conscious processes of our mind will become deeper and more distributed in the years to come, and why this will lead to a ‘reconception’ of the human mind. Might the neuronal systems of the brain be replicated to create artificial consciousness? And if so, would machine consciousness be superior to our own?Presented by Jack Gwilym Roberts.