Interview with Social Philosopher Roman Krznaric

Mar 4, 2025 | Signals to Watch

Nan Nelson, Economic Transformations

Futurist Andrew Curry is recommending we check out an interview with the social philosopher Roman Krznaric on Five Books about how the lessons of history might help us navigate the present. It’s prompted by Krznaric’s recent book History for Tomorrow.  There’s a long tradition that we can’t learn from history, and there’s another one that says that we tend to draw the wrong conclusions because we use history metaphorically and then choose the wrong metaphors. Krznaric is interested in patterns, which Curry thinks is an underlying principle of futures work: patterns exist.

Krznaric has a chapter in his book on artificial intelligence, which seems essentially modern. “Reading Why History Matters made me think,” Curry says. “Have we ever created large-scale systems which could potentially get out of control, which is one of the potential risks of AI?”

And he answers, “Yes, we have. We invented the instruments of financial capitalism in the Netherlands in the early 17th century: the first stock exchanges, the first public limited companies, marine insurance. It was a human-created system that very quickly got out of control, with the advent of multiple financial crashes.

As the futurist Wendy Schultz says from time to time: to be a good futurist you also need to be a good historian. Deep structures matter.