Warning Signs and Philosophy: How to Shape the Future
What if the biggest threats to our future aren’t the ones we don’t see, but the ones we keep choosing to ignore?
We live in a time of constant alerts. We’re warned about authoritarianism, climate collapse, technological overreach, and social breakdown, yet most of us carry on as if these dangers belong to some distant future, not the world already taking shape around us. Why do so many warnings fail to land. And why are the people raising them so often dismissed as alarmists, idealists, or outsiders?
In this Growth Lab LIVE session, philosopher and author Santiago Zabala explores the deeper meaning of warnings, not as gloomy predictions, but as signals that the future is still open. Drawing on the ideas from his latest book, Signs from the Future, Zabala argues that warnings are powerful because they interrupt the story that everything is fixed or inevitable. Predictions can make us passive. Warnings can wake us up.
This is a conversation about attention, responsibility, and imagination. About why we struggle to respond to danger until it feels unavoidable, and what it might take to treat today’s warning signs as an invitation to think and act differently.
About the speaker:
Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of a number of books, including Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017) and Being at Large. Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (2020), and most recently, Signs from the Future. A Philosophy of Warnings (2025). Zabala has also written opinion articles for publications including the New York Times, Al Jazeera, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Agenda:
1830h - Doors open
1900h - Talk starts
2000h - Q&A
2030h - Drinks & Networking (upstairs at Bar Bailen)
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