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"This election year, Marketplace will be casting its eyes toward the future, asking how the country can address long term opportunities and threats - the ones that don't fit into a single federal budget or election cycle. We'll imagine and ask you, if the next President were to appoint a Cabinet member to worry about future generations, what would be job one?"

"Technology has always promised a better future … eventually. Somehow the real breakthroughs have always seemed to be just around the corner. But somehow, when we weren't quite paying attention, the future actually arrived. Thanks to forward-thinking researchers calling on advances in genomics, artificial intelligence, food science, and drug hacking, a more resilient, enlightened, and cognitively-, physically-, and sexually-enhanced human already walks among us. (And her skin is amazing.) Here, eight exciting new health technologies - and where they're heading next."

"Oryx and Crake is speculative fiction at its finest. Part dystopian satire, part post-apocalyptic nightmare, the novel examines the flaws of contemporary society through the lens of an imagined future that could all too easily come to pass. But examines isn't the right word for what Atwood accomplishes here; eviscerates is more fitting. As in The Handmaid's Tale (1985), her classic takedown of totalitarian theocratic misogyny, the author's satiric wit is razor-sharp and unsparing. Oryx and Crake isn't a book for the faint of heart or the easily offended. Potential outrages include a narcissistic, self-pitying protagonist who treats women poorly, unflinching depictions of child pornography and sex slavery, all manner of unfettered consumerist debauchery, and (spoiler alert) the deliberate annihilation of the human race by a brilliant scientist. Oh, and corporations control the world, social and economic inequality are endemic, catastrophic climate change is a given, and science and technology, especially genetic engineering, are exploited purely for profit by said all-powerful corporations without regard for human consequences. If some of these details sound uncomfortably like the present, well, that's the point. Oryx and Crake isn't about the future; it's about the present. The book is about us. Whatever future ultimately comes to pass-dystopian, post-apocalyptic, or otherwise-we are responsible for it. This story is our story. "

""Future You" is a monthly video series in which NPR's Future Correspondent Elise Hu explores how today's emerging science and technology could change what it means to be human by the year 2050."

"The man who served as executive producer on such blockbusters as "Django Unchained," "Silver Linings Playbook," and "Reservoir Dogs," Weinstein is no stranger to controversy, and often gets behind films with a social conscience. It's with a similar agenda that he tells Piers Morgan of his pledge to stay away from egregious gun violence in future projects, in the process, answering critics who suggest his verbal attacks against the NRA stand in dark contrast to many of the movies he's helped make."

"Excerpted from the book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The rest of the book is about another tale - one that's not fictional and not yet written: the tale of our own future with AI. How would you like it to play out? Could something remotely like the Omega story actually occur and, if so, would you want it to? Leaving aside speculations about superhuman AI, how would you like our tale to begin? How do you want AI to impact jobs, laws and weapons in the coming decade? Looking further ahead, how would you write the ending? This tale is one of truly cosmic proportions, for it involves nothing short of the ultimate future of life in our universe. And it's a tale for us to write."

"Over the past many weeks, we dispatched nine reporters to find and interview 46 kids from wildly different backgrounds and from all over the country. Most of these kids are either 17 years old or high school seniors or both. In the interviews, you'll meet city kids and rural kids, pro-life teens and a kid who had to go to extraordinary lengths to get an abortion in Texas, U.S.-born kids and immigrants, kids for whom the future is golden, and kids who grew up in places where survival - much less success - is far from assured. We asked if they felt safe and optimistic, what they saw the future holding for themselves and their country, who they looked up to, and what older generations got wrong about them. But we also just talked to them about their lives. What did we find?"

"Immersion can already put you inside a giant redwood and a cell in Maine State Prison, and developers are building ways to holographically transport us into 3D digital worlds and allow us to live the experiences of another person. But how far can this go-and how will it change us? We talked to five immersive technology pioneers working across journalism, filmmaking, storytelling, and scientific research. Their ideas offer a range of perspectives about the potential of immersive technologies. What they all have in common, however, is the belief that immersive technology can be a positive force for the future - depending on what the rest of us choose to do with it."

"It's easy to believe that the human race won't be around for long, when you consider the state of the world today. But it's often been the role of the artist to bring us hope. That's why we've asked several illustrators this month to envision what humans might look like in 100 years as part of our monthly magazine, Future Human. You can check out the first and second entry here. This week's installment imagines technology as a positive force rather than one that will destroy us. Maybe we'll pour all of our workforces into a global cleanup crew. Or maybe we'll use augmented reality to build empathy and conserve resources. There are endless possibilities. Which fork in the road will you take?"

""If, as many climate models suggest, our planet becomes one of killer heat waves, fickle rain, and baked croplands, might new human societies emerge in places currently unappealing for settlement?" asks Laurence C. Smith, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, in his book, The World in 2050 - Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future. "Could the 21st century see the decline of the southwestern United States and European Mediterranean, but the ascent of the northern United States, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia?" According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body that evaluates the science of climate change, the answer, for the year 2100, is "Yes." At that time, when Earth's atmosphere contains 1,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide - highly plausible, scientists say; today it's 410 ppm - places such as Greenland, Canada, Russia, and the northern United States would be significantly warmer and receive more precipitation than today. They would be downright livable. Based on today's climate science, here are five of the best places to live in 2100."

"Young adult fiction is awash in projections of a dystopian future, yet we're still sliding into that future, and young adults are going along with it."

"Amazon and other tech giants have made devices connected to the internet increasingly prevalent. Now is the time to be freaking out about the dangers."

"By being unreal, she is an error-proof ideal. And by being the ideal, she represents a liberation from celebrity as much as its fulfillment. A pop singer today is, mostly, a beautiful image of a person who sings other people's material, and those other people, the creators, are mostly forgotten. "There are plenty of people who can do great music but who will never get on stage because they're not young, fit, beautiful people," says Amy Fineshriber, a fan who also occasionally works for Crypton Media. She has a point. When was the last time you saw a bad-looking pop singer? Hatsune Miku spares the creators the need to have the bodies they cannot have. For the imperfect, the overweight, the shy, the normal kids with regular bodies who just love pop music, Hatsune Miku bears the burden of the perfection demanded from celebrities, so that these kids can make the music they want to hear."

"Scientists and businesses working full steam to produce lab-created meat claim it will be healthier than conventional meat and more environmentally friendly. But how much can they improve on old-school pork or beef?"

"Back in July, an idea by Kalle Lasn and his colleagues at Adbusters, a nonprofit magazine run by social activists, had started to come together. For months, Lasn had noticed among his 120,000 readers an unresolved anger that wasn't finding expression. He observed that young people were starting to say they worried about having a "black hole future" ahead of them, and it suddenly felt, he said, "like a Tahrir moment in America was eminently possible." So the Adbusters team tried something out. They put out feelers for a small protest on Wall Street on Sept. 17. They started a hashtag to go with it, the catchy-sounding #OccupyWallStreet. They ran a poster in the magazine to advertise it (see above). And before they knew it, the protests had taken on a life of their own:"

"Journalists need to generate a national discussion on the future of the internet"

"Melissa Coker, 35, the founder and creative director of the clothing company Wren, commissioned the video to showcase her clothing line's fall collection for Style.com's Video Fashion Week. Style.com had created the video series for brands that might lack the financial wherewithal to put on a runway show during Fashion Week. The video's outrageous popularity had the web abuzz all week, with some industry experts suggesting that it could force major designers to think more expansively about how to advertise future collections."

"This is a stupendously awesome commercial from a toy company called GoldieBlox, which has developed a set of interactive books and games to "disrupt the pink aisle and inspire the future generation of female engineers." The CEO, Debbie Sterling, studied engineering at Stanford, where she was dismayed by the lack of women in her program"

"Global mobile traffic now accounts for 15 percent of all internet visits, and 91 percent of mobile internet access is used for social activities. By investing heavily in this space Twitter can essentially guarantee a richer future… and a significant audience uptick. This infographic from Super Monitoring takes a closer look at the state of mobile 2013."

""I see the project as both colonialist and deceptive," Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, told me. "It tries to solve a problem it doesn't understand, but it doesn't need to understand the problem because it already knows the solution. The solution conveniently helps lock in Facebook as the dominant platform for the future at a moment when growth in developed markets is slowing." Before we go any further, let's unpack the two discordant narratives that underscore this debate."