Scala Futures: Concurrency Interpreted! Futures let us run values off the main thread and handle background or yet to be run values by mapping them with callbacks. See how they work in Scala. by Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.Join For Free Futures allow us to run values off the main thread and handle values that are running in the background or yet to be executed by mapping them with callbacks. If you come from a Java background, you might be aware of java.util.concurrent.Future. There are several challenges in using this: Threads are always blocked while retrieving values.