Could Should Might Don't
How We Think About the Future
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'Rigorous, rationally optimistic and ultimately empowering' OLIVER BURKEMAN
'A deeply-considered - and funny - treatise on complacency' ALEX McDOWELL
'Essential' DAVID EAGLEMAN
'A rare and wondrous thing' STEPHEN FRY
As the tempo of change accelerates beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined, the ability to think clearly about what lies ahead has never been more important – yet we remain remarkably bad at it.
So how might we think about the future with greater rigour?
Nick Foster is one of very few people to have built a career considering this question, and in this book he’s written an invaluable guide for the rest of us. From the Could of excitable, science fiction utopianism and the Should of data-driven, dogmatic certainty, to the Might of scenario planning and the Don’t of fear-driven risk avoidance, Foster explores how humanity has grappled with the concept of the future throughout history, tracing the emergence of distinct schools of thought and exploring the virtues, blind spots and inevitable shortcomings of each.
Could Should Might Don’t resists making cocksure prophecies and bombastic predictions, instead encouraging us to create more balanced, detailed and truthful versions of the future, so that we might improve what we leave behind for those who might follow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Starry-eyed visions of glamorous people enjoying miraculous technology misrepresent a future reality that might be glitchier and grungier, according to this intriguing if flawed debut manifesto. Foster, a designer who works with tech companies including Google and Sony, outlines four schools of futurist prognosticating that inform government and corporate planners: "Could Futurists" are boosters for things to come, which are often showcased in "vision videos" of families beaming at their gee-whiz gadgets; "Should Futurists" lay out unduly confident road maps to an improved future based in sketchy quantitative models that are little more than "numeric fictions"; "Might Futurists" evaluate the probabilities of different and potentially clashing future scenarios; and pessimistic "Don't Futurists" look for the complex ways in which the future will go wrong. Foster offers biting and persuasive takedowns of stale futurist tropes as a mix of sci-fi schlock and consumerist porn but stumbles in his pointed refusal to paint a clear portrait of what the future might actually look like (he suggests it will be more of "a quotidian, lived-in evolution of the present" but leans heavily on vague theoreticals: "What happens when we imagine this VR headset in Derek's backpack rather than in the hands of a scientist in a pristine white laboratory?"). This abstract exercise may be of interest to professional designers but will disappoint lay readers. Photos.
