37. Realer Than Real: Useful Fiction with P.W. Singer and August Cole

Peter Warren Singer is Strategist and Senior Fellow at New America. He has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators, by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues, and by Foreign Policy to their Top 100 Global Thinkers List. Mr. Singer is the author of multiple best-selling, award winning books in both fiction and nonfiction. Described in the Wall Street Journal as “the premier futurist in the national-security environment,” Mr. Singer is considered one of the world’s leading experts on changes in 21st century warfare, with more books on the military professional reading lists than any other author, living or dead. He has consulted for the U.S. Military, Defense Intelligence Agency, and FBI, as well as advised a range of entertainment programs, including for Warner Brothers, Dreamworks, Universal, HBO, Discovery, History Channel, and the video game series Call of Duty.

August Cole is an author and futurist exploring the future of conflict through fiction and other forms of storytelling. He is a non-resident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council; he directed the Council’s Art of the Future Project, which explores creative and narrative works for insight into the future of conflict, from its inception in 2014 through 2017. Mr. Cole is a regular speaker to private sector, academic, and U.S. and allied government audiences. He also leads the Strategy team for the Warring with Machines AI ethics project at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

Messrs. Singer and Cole co-authored the best selling Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, a near-future thriller about the next world war. Foreign Policy states “Every Army officer should read it…. we need to imagine what war will look like in the future so that we are prepared to win.” Last year, Messrs. Singer and Cole co-authored Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution — our colleagues at War on the Rocks stated that this novel “will do more for defense experts’ understanding of this brave new world with literature than a thousand non-fiction assessments would have.”

In today’s podcast, Messrs. Singer and Cole discuss the power of fictional intelligence; the importance of storytelling, narrative, and verisimilitude in crafting tales of future possibilities that resonate and inform; and the significance of imagination. The following bullet points highlight key insights from our discussion:

• FicInt, also known as fictional intelligence or ‘useful fiction,’ combines extensive research and futures forecasting with worldbuilding and narrative,...