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.
