Being a futurist has to be a pretty great job. Not only do you get to spend all of your time thinking about how the world is going to be in the future, but no one is really going to be able to check your work because by the time we get to the future you'll all be dead. There is no other job in existence where the need for provable results of your work is based entirely on the honor system. It's essentially like being a science fiction writer within the subgenre "Possibly Attainable Real World" and there is no need to come up with compelling characters or find a plausible way to explain exactly how faster-than-light space travel is possible.

While I'm poking a little bit of fun, futurology is a very real scientific discipline, albeit a discipline that doesn't really require much schooling or training beyond a vivid imagination. But the study of the future does have a place in the social sciences and is often a looser, unkept companion to history. The goal of Future Studies is to use examined cultural and technological momentum that is observable in the modern world and try to predict where it will eventually take us into the future.