The future has in the past decade been transformed from a digital, global utopia into a polarized cesspool of conflict, job-stealing robots and “us-and-them-ing”. We can argue about what happened or we can start to look for a way out of this prison of the present and reclaim the creative canvas that the future can – and should – represent. Not only is learning the sound of ignorance leaving the brain, it is the soundtrack of all our tomorrow’s. This session will take a broad and different view of what future thinking is and how we can apply it to make something different…maybe even better than what’s around us right now.

Once named “the best Swedish export since ABBA and meatballs”, Magnus is a trendspotting futurologist and author who weaves together the most exciting current trends “with the intelligence of a scientist and the humour of a comedian” to forecast what society and business might look like in the future.

As a writer, Magnus is driven by a relentless curiosity about our mental space where the outside world collides with the human brain. His recent book ‘Minifesto’ (2016) tells us why small ideas matter in the world of grand narratives. That by sharing a vision of the future we can strive to surround ourselves with as many strange, conflicting ideas that we can in order to immerse ourselves in future possibilities and possible futures.

Magnus is a graduate of Stockholm School of Economics and UCLA School of Film, Television and Theatre, and has managed to fuse tangible data with the imaginative storytelling of Hollywood. The result is a journalist’s relentless curiosity, the rock-solid knowledge of an economist and the thirst of an unrelieved rock star to mesmerize an audience.