The founders lecture 2016, by eminent historian and Honorary Fellow, Professor Sir Brian Harrison, FBA. The talk explores changing attitudes to the future and the reasons for them. This involves thinking about the changing relationship between past, present and future, and studying the attitudes and activities of people and professions claiming to be able to predict or even influence the future – such as statisticians, planners, demographers, actuaries, inventors, authors of utopias and dystopias, and religious visionaries. The lecture aims to set in perspective the importance (or otherwise) of historical study.