Future Files
a history of the next 50 years
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Prediction is a dangerous game — the future is never a straight, linear extrapolation from the present. Unexpected innovations and events will conspire to trip up the best-laid plans — but it’s better than not thinking about the future at all.
This updated and revised edition of Future Files is filled with provocative forecasts about how the world might change in the next half century. It examines emerging patterns and developments in society, technology, economy, and business, and makes educated speculations as to where they might take us.
But Future Files is not primarily about prediction. Its goal is to liberate our collective and individual imaginations so that we can see the familiar in a new light and the unfamiliar with greater clarity, and to make us all — individuals and organisations — think about where we are going and to consider whether, when we get there, it will be worth staying.
Future Files will prove indispensable to business analysts, strategists, and organisations, and provides rich and fascinating material for us all to contemplate as we rush headlong into the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cheaper than a crystal ball and twice as fun, this book by futurist and web creator Watson examines what "someday" could be like, based on the five key trends of ageing; power shift to the East; global connectivity; the "GRIN" technologies of Genetics, Robotics, Internet, and Nanotechnology; environmental concerns, and 50 less general but equally influential developments that will radically alter human life by the year 2050. Watson gently scoffs at Jetsons-like wishful-thinking technology and flying cars; instead he predicts the fanciful (mindwipes, stress-control clothing, napcaps that induce sleep) and the useful (devices to harness the sea to generate energy; self-repairing car paint; retail technology that helps us shop, based on past buying habits; hospital plasters that monitor vital signs). In between the fun and frivolity, he prognosticates the frightening: the "extinction" of individual ugliness and free public spaces; the creation of hybrid humans; a society made of people who are incapable of the tiniest tasks; and insects that carry wireless cameras to monitor our lives. Part Jules Verne, part Malcolm Gladwell, Watson has a puckish sense of humor and his book is a thought-provoking, laughter-inducing delight.
