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.

Our relationship with the future is broken. Looming crises—from AI disruption and economic injustice to the collapse of democratic norms—can overwhelm us with feelings of apathy and hopelessness. The answer to these challenges is imagination, the overlooked human superpower that is the ignition system for empathy, anticipation, and resilience. In How to Change the Future, Ed Finn delivers an engaging field guide to imagination, revealing how we can practice and share this amazing capacity to see our world differently and envision a better tomorrow.

Drawing on fields ranging from creativity and futures studies to philosophy and cognitive science, Finn argues that imagination is the hidden architect of human experience. In conversation with legendary science fiction authors like Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, and Ted Chiang, he moves from the individual to the collective, making the case that imagination is inherently collaborative: a team sport. Through the stories and projects of engineers and designers, activists and world leaders, writers and researchers, Finn illustrates how we can harness imagination to dream up better futures and transform reality—not just as individuals, but as the caretakers of Planet Earth, and ancestors of those who will inherit it from us. How to Change the Future offers up a playbook for navigating present challenges and reigniting imagination for a hopeful future.