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Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years
 
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Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years (Paperback)

by Richard Watson (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
RRP: £12.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing (25 Sep 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1857885147
  • ISBN-13: 978-1857885149
  • Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15.2 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 17,937 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

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 Pick of the Week 13 October 2008

Woven together brilliantly. --Richard Hytner, Vice Chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide

Provocative, entertaining, full of surprising facts a book to help you decide whether the world is going mad or possibly becoming more intelligent. --Theodore Zeldin author of An Intimate History of Humanity

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.

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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining and insightful read, 23 Oct 2008
By Matt Doyle - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Inspired and thought provoking, 20 Oct 2008
By Dr. A. S. Martin (Cornwall, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Bloated and slapdash, 16 Oct 2008
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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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A very compelling and inspiring guide to the Future
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