How to Change the Future

A playful field guide to imagination: humanity’s greatest superpower and our only hope for surviving the twenty-first century.

How to Change the Future tackles the biggest problem facing the human species: our broken relationship with the future. If looming crises—from AI disruption and the wealth gap to the collapse of democratic norms—overwhelm us with anxiety, fear, even despair, we are suffering, first and foremost, from a failure of imagination. This is the message Ed Finn delivers in this book, and he follows up with nothing short of a user’s manual for the imagination, a guide to seeing our world differently and planning for a different future.

Drawing on what we know of evolution, philosophy, and cognitive science, with reference to pioneering artists and scientists, Finn argues that imagination is the hidden architect of human experience. In conversation with science fiction legends like Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, and Ted Chiang, he moves from the individual to the collective: imagination as a team sport; and through the stories and projects of these writers and researchers, he illustrates how we can harness imagination to dream up better futures and reframe the present. We already inhabit architectures of imagination. And by changing our own imaginations we can transform reality—the planet, ourselves, and those future generations who will inherit our world. Here, with How to Change the Future as our guide, we can begin.