Lisbon, June 30, 2025 (Lusa) - In an interview with Lusa, futurist Erica Orange believes that the attack on truth will be one of the greatest existential challenges and that we must ask the questions that the future will demand and rely on technology in moderation.
Erica Orange, who is executive vice president and chief operating officer of The Future Hunters, one of the world’s leading futurist consulting firms, is one of the speakers at the 34th APDC congress, which kicks off on Tuesday in Lisbon with the theme ‘Business & Science Working Together’.
Someone asked her how she defines the times we live in, with the rapid development of AI, wars and the spread of misinformation, and Erica Orange contextualises it with a term coined at the company where she works, ‘templosion’, which is “basically the implosion of time”.
She explains: “Great things are happening in increasingly shorter periods of time and we are shortening time scales”.
Previously, “things used to happen in decades and now they happen in years truncated into months and, in some cases, weeks. What we see is a leap of change. We see this when it comes to artificial intelligence, we see it even when it happens with the shortening of generations,” she explained.
Forbes named her one of the world’s ‘top 50’ futurist women in 2020, and she explains that we are witnessing a compression and, at the same time, a growing abyss.
“It’s as if there were two large mountain ranges far apart from each other and we are alternating between this exponential rate of technological change and our ability to adapt and adjust to it,” she said.
“That’s where we cultivate a lot of the confusion and, I believe, much of the widespread fear, because our brains need more time to keep up, (...) our biology needs more time to keep up with all these exponential advances fast enough,” she pointed out.
Then, she added, “to the mix” comes “the trust and truth of that (...), which is the rampant increase” of information that is incorrect, distorted or of poor quality, in short, “fake news,” she said, adding “digitally derived information” (generated by digital systems).
In fact, current technology, specifically AI-based ‘deepfakes,’ is causing us to live in an environment where we need more clarity to differentiate between what is real, fake or true, and we increasingly need stronger evidence to “prove any” of these realities, she added.
This is “knowing that 84% of people believe what generative AI wants them to believe”.
Therefore, “there are many ripple effects across the industry when we have the combination of deterioration of truth and trust,” but “there are some technological solutions.”
In response to questions about actions that can reduce the impact of this, the expert pointed out that the biggest, most comprehensive and critical solution depends on all humans.
In other words, “we must train our own eyes and brains not only to think critically, but to question everything we see, find, read and hear” to uncover, “through the lens of critical thinking,” whether what is said is based on truth or falsehood, she says.
“With a positive tone, I really believe that (…) the attack on truth will be one of the greatest existential challenges of our time,” said Erica Orange.
That is why “it is imperative, and I feel this as a futurist, but also as a mother [her son is eight years old],” she says.
“I think a lot through the perspective of his generation and what we will have to cultivate from an educational point of view in younger generations, because they will live in a world where the artificial and the biological will be interconnected,” she emphasised.
Much of this boils down to “questioning and asking the questions that the future will demand and balancing technology’s rapid evolution with critical thinking, and, in addition to critical thinking, I would put human judgment and human supervision as two other really important pieces of this puzzle,” she concluded.
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