Future Files
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Review
Cheaper than a crystal ball and twice as fun...Part Jules Verne, part Malcolm Gladwell, Watson has a puckish sense of humor and his book is a thought-provoking, laughter-inducing delight. --Publishers Weekly
A must read. WEll written and concise predictions. --MediaFuturist
Futurologist Richard Watson takes us on a thought-provoking journey into tomorrow's world. --Daily Telegraph
A must read. WEll written and concise predictions. --MediaFuturist
Futurologist Richard Watson takes us on a thought-provoking journey into tomorrow's world. --Daily Telegraph
Review
A detailed investigation into what author Richard Watson believes are the five key trends that will shape our future. There is an amusing "extinction timeline" for the next 50 years, where he nails his colours to the mast in predicting the ideas destined for the scrap-heap
Inspirational read. Take a peek 50 years into the future with this fascinating map of the trends that will change our lives. Mind-blowing predictions are interlaced with fictional letters from the future to better illustrate the effect of these scientific advances on people's lives. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inspirational read. Take a peek 50 years into the future with this fascinating map of the trends that will change our lives. Mind-blowing predictions are interlaced with fictional letters from the future to better illustrate the effect of these scientific advances on people's lives. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inspired and thought provoking,
By
This review is from: Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years (Paperback)
This is definitely one of my favourite books. The future is more difficult to forecast than ever before, yet quite a lot of people (myself included) have jobs that involve some degree of positioning for the long term. I found Richard Watson's fresh, fun and mischievous approach to future forecasting very compelling and useful in my work.
It's no so much the actual predictions, but the "joined up thinking" that I most enjoyed. Watson has taken observations of the present, used logical extrapolation and then (the bit I like) combined two or more of these threads together to arrive at initially surprising, yet on further contemplation quite reasonable future predictions. This is certainly a book for people interested in the future, but perhaps also for people who experience concern about the future. I felt as though reading the book allowed me to glimpse a wide range of possible futures and comprehend some of the factors that determine which fork(s) we will chose along the path. In doing so, the future feels less unknown. Richard Watson runs a web site http://www.nowandnext.com/ where you can experience his way of thinking with a lot of free content and also download Chapter one of the book.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An entertaining and insightful read,
By
This review is from: Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years (Paperback)
I found this book entertaining, amusing, and also thought-provoking. It's a fast-paced "stream of consciousness" ride through a whole spectrum of facts, trends, quotations, ideas and forecasts, from society and government through to science, technology, food, retail and travel (and more besides).
Future Files provides a snapshot of where we are as a planet today coupled with extrapolations, thoughts and insights to get the creative juices flowing. I found that the book sparked a lot of fresh ideas on both a business and a personal level, and engendered a certain amount of perspective and clarity on many topics and trends. The book contains hundreds of facts, ideas and connections, yet its style is engaging and easy to follow, making it hard to put down. Well worth reading if you're at all involved in business decision-making, or if you simply fancy an entertaining, eye-opening look at both our present and our possible future!
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bloated and slapdash,
This review is from: Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years (Paperback)
Alarm bells started to ring on page two of the introduction, when the author explains that this book is based on an 8,000 word article which a commissioning editor at a publishing company asked if he could "stretch out" to 90,000 words. After that guileless admission, it was hardly a surprise that the book felt so waffly and padded.
What did surprise me is that there appears to have been no attempt to impose retrospective order on ideas chucked down in whatever sequence they popped into the author's head ("Actually, mentioning religion brings me to another thought: perhaps science will be the new religion"). It reads like a stream-of-consciousness first draft. So we have the author contradicting himself in the space of a single paragraph: he notes that working longer hours is not making us happier, then argues that we introspect more about happiness because we have more time on our hands. And we have sloppy non-sequiturs: "if a generation has fewer offspring, its genetic legacy is reduced. This means that the beliefs to which a generation adheres weaken over time." Beliefs are transmitted genetically? If you want a scattergun collection of ideas about the future and don't mind an inane and shallow writing style, this is fine. If you're hoping for a level of analysis that rises above "personally I think that AI in any meaningful sense is a long way off. Having said that, can you imagine the implications if an internet of the future did actually become aware of its own existence? Ohmygawd", don't waste your money.
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