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Richard Hames

Strategic Futurist and Corporate Philosopher

Strategic Foresight & Design, Business, Asia, Governance, AI, Finance
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Richard David Hames is a globally recognised futurist and strategic foresight expert who helps leaders understand the profound shifts reshaping business, society and geopolitics. Drawing on five decades of advising governments, CEOs and international organisations, he challenges conventional thinking to help audiences anticipate disruption, navigate complexity and prepare for the future with confidence.

Described by Forbes Asia as “one of the smartest people on the planet”, Richard’s groundbreaking insights challenge the boundaries of conventional thinking and inspire us to reimagine our collective future.

A polymath, dynamic public speaker, and visionary entrepreneur, Richard stands as a trailblazing force in global leadership, constantly sought by governments and business leaders for his searing intellect and remarkably accurate foresight on all issues concerning the future of humanity

Based purely on performance, Dr Richard Hames – Chairman of the Asian Foresight Institute, an elected Fellow of the World Academy of Art & Science, and personal mentor to Heads of State, CEOs and entrepreneurs – is considered to be the most accurate futurist in the world.

An Australian citizen, educated in Europe and domiciled in Asia, Richard has been honoured with numerous awards. Not just a compelling and entertaining speaker, he is the author of seven books, and the executive director of the Centre for the Future – a unique global startup whose mission is to redesign humanity’s presence on the Earth and to create a world that works for everyone.

He co-founded MiVote, one of the hottest socio-political movements in the world, and also Horizon State – capitalised to the tune of around $100M overnight and whose blockchain-enabled voting platform was voted 7th out of 100 technologies most likely to change the world.

Richard is also the strategic adviser behind Riversimple’s hydrogen car activities in the UK.
As a foresight practitioner Richard and his team have examined hundreds of topics, ranging from the future of conflict and work, to taxation, business and manufacturing, food security, international terrorism, smart cities, financial services, health care, science and alternative energy.

TESTIMONIALS

“Richard Hames provides a powerful diagnosis of present realities, new paradigms of thought, and an ecological model of action in an uncertain world.”

Peter Schwartz
President, Global Business Network

“Richard is unique among strategists; always entertaining and challenging but generous to a fault with ideas, personal connections, and ways that can be turned into commercial advantage.”

Michelle Gass
President and CEO, Levi Strauss & Co.

“Richard’s capacity to weave together the major issues that are shaping our future world is extraordinary.”

Michael Roux
Chairman, Australian Davos Connection

“Richard Hames has, in a very significant way, helped us to reshape the Australian Taxation Office and lay the foundations for a new organization that is now so essential as we move into a huge tax reform process here in Australia.”

Michael Carmody
Commissioner, Australian Taxation Office

Teaching Silicon How to Feel: The Last Developer’s Guide to Everything That Matters

Teaching Silicon How to Feel reframes the whole AI debate at a stroke. Instead of asking “how do we stop machines from harming us?” we need to ask “what have we already normalised as acceptable harm?”. Richard David Hames argues that contemporary AI is being trained on a civilisation, culture and history shaped by slavery, genocide, colonialism, factory farming, drone warfare and extractive capitalism – and that without deliberate intervention, those patterns of cruelty and indifference will be quietly hard-wired into our most powerful systems.

Organised around 17 theoretically ‘unresolvable’ catalysts – from The Inheritance of Cruelty and The Unseen Economies of Suffering to The Algorithm of Oblivion and The Fractal of Indifference – the book probes the darkest angels of human nature. Drawing on philosophy, political and economic history, trauma science and critical technology studies, Hames shows how our institutions encode violence, how that violence shows up in data and infrastructures, and why AI magnifies whatever we feed it.

This is not another abstract ethics treatise or tech-doom prophecy. Each catalyst is paired with a ‘From Theory to Praxis’ section that speaks directly to people building and governing AI systems. Readers learn how to:

  • Curate healing-focused and relational datasets
  • Embed epigenetic empathy checks and ethical audit loops
  • Redesign recommender systems to interrupt isolation feedback loops
  • Construct ‘metabolic vetoes’ and governance architectures that refuse to profit from suffering

Written in accessible, lucid prose for a general audience, Teaching Silicon How to Feel will also inform software engineers, machine learning practitioners, UX designers, policymakers, ethicists, systems thinkers and anyone alarmed by the speed and direction of AI deployment. It offers a stark diagnosis of our current trajectory and a radical, practical invitation: to enlist AI as an ally in dismantling the hidden economies of suffering that have defined the worst of human civilisation.

Richard Hames

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