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The best way to predict the future is to create it. --Abraham Lincoln The Earth we have and the world we want The future will arrive, including new technology. Do we want whatever future just happens to happen, or do we want to guide the process? If the latter, here I explain how it is that the field of human factors (HF) is responsible for planning and building a sustainable future human civilization. It was not my idea. I heard it from Waldemar Karwowski at the Past President’s Forum at the 2013 meeting of the Human Factors and Engineering Society. But I am running with it. At first it was startling, at least to me, that HF would have as a goal to build a sustainable human civilization. It was not the size or difficulty of the goal that bothered me — a goal of physics is to explain everything physical, a goal of psychology is to explain everything mental, and a goal of philosophy is to understand existence itself. What was startling to me was that that t...

By Marc Egeth It was not my idea. I heard it from Waldemar Karwowski at the Past President’s Forum at the 2013 meeting of the Human Factors and Engineering Society. But I am running with it. At first it was startling, at least to me, that HF would have as a goal to build a sustainable human civilization. It was not the size or difficulty of the goal that bothered me — a goal of physics is to explain everything physical, a goal of psychology is to explain everything mental, and a goal of philosophy is to understand existence itself. What was startling to me was that that this purported goal of human factors, to create a sustainable human civilization going indefinitely into the future, was not already claimed by another scholastic field. As I thought through field after field, I could not find a better contender for guiding the future of human civilization than human factors. The basic sciences have no direction but to understand reality (though this is part of their beauty). The...