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The Future

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The Future

By: Nick Montfort
Narrated by: Sean Pratt
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About this listen

In this volume of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, Nick Montfort argues that the future is something to be made, not predicted.

Montfort offers what he considers essential knowledge about the future, as seen in the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers (mainly in Western culture) who developed and described the core components of the futures they envisioned. Montfort's approach is not that of futurology or scenario planning; instead, he reports on the work of making the future - the thinkers who devoted themselves to writing pages in the unwritten book. Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Ted Nelson didn't predict the future of computing, for instance. They were three of the people who made it.

Montfort focuses on how the development of technologies - with an emphasis on digital technologies - has been bound up with ideas about the future. Listeners learn about kitchens of the future and the vision behind them; literary utopias, from Plato's Republic to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair; and what led up to Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web.

©2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2018 Gildan Media Future Studies Media Studies Social Sciences Technology

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All stars
Most relevant
Not sure what I was expecting, in hindsight, but probably more trend forecasting, less overviews of past attempts to predict the semi-distant future / evolution of technology. But it was still kinda fun, albeit nothing much I hadn't known before. Handy short summary of key approaches at the end, mind - but that's key approaches to making a future vision seem compelling, not to getting it right...

A history of attempts to predict the future

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