The Future Starts NOW
The choices we make today, as individuals, as businesses, and as societies ripple out all around us, amplifying over time. What will future generations – our children and our grandchildren (indeed, even our future selves, should we live long enough, as well we could)- make of the choices we are making on their behalf?
The truth is, the future is not fixed: It is neither as bleak as the profits of doom predict, nor as shiny and brilliant as the optimistic smooth talking “singularity” soothsayers promise. Despite what powerful, power hungry politicians and high-profile profit hungry businesses “personalities” tell us, nothing is “inevitable” (except for death and taxes, and even then…).
This means: “exponential growth” is not guaranteed, UBI is not the “only solution” to surviving the “robot uprising”; moving to a Mars colony is not the only way to “save” the human race from climate change; you will probably never own a flying car; and submitting to an omniscient surveillance state is not the only way to protect our babies from the big bad world outside.
We are better – deserve better – and can do better than these limited overly optimistic and overly pessimistic visions will have us believe.
We also have the power to change the future of the future to a future that works for more of us. That is why we, Theo Priestley and myself, Bronwyn Williams , together with a carefully selected group of our fellow disillusioned futurists from all over the world are putting together a new book, which will be published by Bloomsbury in the UK and all around the worlds in late 2020, as an apology to future generations – and a warning to our own.
The Future Starts Now project is designed to get us thinking about the futures we don’t want to live in, as well as those that we do we want to create – and to suggest some actionable solutions we can implement today to make sure we end up in the future we want for ourselves and our dependents.
This is we’ve invited leading future-thinkers from all over the world to share their ideas on where the world is going wrong, and what we can do NOW to start getting things right again.
The questions we ask and attempt to answer in The Future Starts Now include everything from eugenics, unnatural selection and amortality, to the future of work, in light of AI, UBI and AR – and the future of nations, economies and civilisation at large in our increasingly compromised, unequal world. We have collected and condensed the best and biggest ideas of our time into one book to give you the insight and perspective you need to both understand and design the future of your own environment.
That said, as much as we believe we have sourced the very best future-thinkers to lead this project, the future is too important to leave up to the experts. There is no one-size-fits-all utopia. That’s why we encourage you to read and share The Future Starts Now and develop your own ideas about the future trajectory of your own life, your own business and your own society.