Artificial intelligence, big data, modern science, and the internet are all revealing a fundamental truth: The world is vastly more complex and unpredictable than we've allowed ourselves to see.
Now that technology is enabling us to take advantage of all the chaos it's revealing, our understanding of how things happen is changing--and with it our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our world. This affects everything, from how we approach our everyday lives to how we make moral decisions and how we run our businesses.
Take machine learning, which makes better predictions about weather, medical diagnoses, and product performance than we do--but often does so at the expense of our understanding of how it arrived at those predictions. While this can be dangerous, accepting it is also liberating, for it enables us to harness the complexity of an immense amount of data around us. We are also turning to strategies that avoid anticipating the future altogether, such as A/B testing, Minimum Viable Products, open platforms, and user-modifiable video games. We even take for granted that a simple hashtag can organize unplanned, leaderless movements such as #MeToo.
Through stories from history, business, and technology, philosopher and technologist David Weinberger finds the unifying truths lying below the surface of the tools we take for granted--and a future in which our best strategy often requires holding back from anticipating and instead creating as many possibilities as we can. The book’s imperative for business and beyond is simple: Make. More. Future.
The result is a world no longer focused on limitations but optimized for possibilities.
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David Weinberger, PhD, has been a pioneering thought leader from the earliest days of the web about the internet’s effect on our lives, on our businesses, and most of all, on our ideas. He has contributed in a remarkably wide range of fields, from marketing to libraries to politics to journalism and more. And he has contributed in a remarkably wide range of ways: as the author of books that have made a difference; a writer for journals from Wired, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review to TV Guide; an acclaimed keynote speaker around the world; a strategic marketing VP and consultant; a teacher; an internet adviser to presidential campaigns; an early social-networking entrepreneur; the codirector of a groundbreaking library innovation lab; a researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and at the US State Department as a Franklin Fellow; and always a passionate advocate for an open internet. His doctorate is in philosophy from the University of Toronto. Author social media/website info: hyperorg.com/blogger/, twitter.com/dweinberger
Danny Campbell is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and an actor who has appeared in CBS’ The Guardian, the films A Pool, a Fool, and a Duel and Greater Than Gravity, and in over twenty-five commercials. He is a company member of the Independent Shakespeare Company in Los Angeles and is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College.