Review by New York Times Review
what do we do about the futurists? For the last few years, the professional conference circuit has been overrun by keynote speakers from San Francisco, bearing job titles like chief optimist and commanding five-figure fees to tell us how lucky we are to be living in a glorious new technological era. From coast to coast, every insurance-sales and dental hygienist convention now features one of these puffy paeans to technology. Robots! Augmented reality! The Internet of Things! All of these innovations will leave us richer, happier and more productive, the futurists tell us, and why not believe them? But futurism in the time of Donald Trump feels fraught. After all, the techno-optimists completely missed the signs of an impending revolution in their backyards: the spread of fake news enabled by social networks; the megaphonic power of Trump's Twitter feed; the rise of the so-called alt-right, a racist, neo-fascist clique that festered on 4chan and Reddit before emerging as a viable political movement. As a result, we fawned over self-driving cars and next-generation artificial intelligence while questions about the politics of all this new technology - the emotional backlash from manufacturing workers losing their jobs to automation, the interference of foreign hackers in American elections, the ability of partisan opportunists to flood Facebook with propaganda - went mostly unanswered. In her book "The Signals Are Talking," Amy Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute, gives us a sophisticated but fairly narrow view of the future. She limits her forecasts to trends in technology, since, as she writes, "technology is the unilateral source of nearly all of the significant things that have changed the world in the past 500 years." (There were a few wars in there, too, but let's concede the premise.) To predict trends, Webb writes, you begin by looking to the fringe, identifying the misfits and early adopters doing bizarre experiments and tinkering with emerging technologies. You look for hidden patterns in the use of these technologies and apply a six-step rubric Webb calls Cipher (contradictions, inflections, practices, hacks, extremes, rarities) to analyze which ones are likely to catch on and reach the mainstream. Then, when you have a trend firmly in hand, you create a strategy to capitalize on the trend, and "pressure-test" that strategy before taking action. Like most modern futurism, Webb's advice is directed primarily at an audience of entrepreneurs and executives trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the competition. But there is more to the future than making money, and "How will this trend affect my bottom line?" is, truthfully, one of the easier questions a futurist can answer. It doesn't take an oracle to predict that automation will displace factory workers, that Crispr gene-editing techniques will lead to a boom in pharmaceutical research or that drones will influence the shipping industry. Much harder is anticipating the downstream effects of these changes on a broader group of people, and it's here that Webb and her futurist peers often resort to hand-waving and generalities. Webb cites Uber as an example of a transformational technology. The ubiquitous ride-hailing app succeeds, she writes, because it "leverages our basic human needs and desires in a meaningful way and aligns human nature with emerging technologies and breakthrough inventions." (And here I thought it was just the cheap fares.) Webb writes that Über "might transform how we think about logistics - not just in the realm of taxis and black cars, but in how we move around people, packages, groceries, pets and just about everything else." She imagines a near future of agriculture in which self-driving Über harvesters dig up crops on farms, place them into self-driving Uber trucks and automatically deliver them to customers. In this Uber-centric future, she writes, "a significant portion of the human-powered jobs in logistics will be obviated." She then moves on, as if the massive labor shock she has just predicted will produce nothing more consequential than robot-farmed rutabagas. But wait. What happens when the 3.5 million Americans who drive trucks for a living and the three million Americans who work on farms get booted from their jobs by Uber-bots? What kind of social safety net might soften the blow of that kind of sudden mass unemployment? What kind of political movement might oppose the rise of a new, monopolistic techno-agricultural power? What are the ecological implications of putting food production in the hands of Silicon Valley tech companies? These are the biggest, most important questions, and the ones on which futurist thinking is most conspicuously absent. in "whiplash," Joi Ito and Jeff Howe apply futurist thinking to a broader set of problems. Ito, the director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, and Howe, a visiting scholar there, are more careful to avoid the kind of futurist fortunetelling that ends in discrete, falsifiable predictions. Instead, they put forth broad theories of technological change, accompanied by examples from their work at the Media Lab. The rise of decentralized crypto-currencies like Bitcoin is an example of "pull over push" ; the runaway success of Scratch, a rudimentary programming language for kids, typifies the theory of "compasses over maps." Ito and Howe - who, like Webb, wrote their book before the 2016 election and can be forgiven for their lack of clairvoyance - are generally optimistic about the future, which they believe will be governed by "emergent systems" rather than topdown rule-making. "Unlike authoritarian systems," they write, "emergent systems foster the kind of nonlinear innovation that can react quickly to the kind of rapid changes that characterize the network age." Left unmentioned is the possibility of a movement like the alt-right, which supports authoritarianism despite having highly reactive, grass-roots origins. To their credit, Ito and Howe don't gloss over the dangers of distributing power to the masses. Nor do they engage in the hackneyed fantasy that our coming techno-utopia will lift billions out of poverty, free us from the burden of work and lead us into a glorious future of leisure and abundance. Justifying the value of alarmism in times of technological upheaval, they write, "Observing institutions of immense economic and social value stumble blithely into a buzz saw struck us as less dinner party conversation and more fouralarm fire." They're right. In our uncertain times, the work of futurism is more important than ever and should be done by people with sufficient imagination about how things could go wrong. Dystopian sci-fi and TV shows like "Black Mirror" are a necessary corrective to the cheerleaders of Silicon Valley, but in the age of Trump, they're not enough. We need serious, thoughtful people to grapple with the implications of innovation and help us recognize the ways that new technology, if placed in an unstable political climate and seized upon by malevolent actors, could result in harm and hardship. The futurists can help us navigate the storms ahead, but first, they need to take off the rosecolored binoculars. ? 'How will this trend affect my bottom line?' is one of the easier questions for a futurist. KEVIN roose is the vice president of editorial at the Fusion channel, and the executive producer and a co-host of its series "Real Future."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Webb founded the Future Today Institute and is renowned in the world of futurism. As mind-blowing as futurism can be and Webb provides several brain-bending future possibilities this book is mainly aimed at business- and investment-minded readers. Her methodology centers on a six-step funnel that gathers and processes information from the technological fringe; she then offers advice about timing and on imagining and testing various scenarios. A key step is to identify hidden patterns by spotting contradictions, inflections, practices, hacks, extremes, and rarities. Webb also counsels readers on how to analyze technology's impact on wealth distribution, education, government, politics, public health, demographics, economics, journalism, and the environment. She describes how treatments such as plastic surgery, anesthetics, and antidepressants moved, over time, from the fringe to the mainstream. And she contrasts the way Nintendo consistently looked ahead and evolved, while the once-massive Digital Equipment Corporation predicted in the 1980s that personal computing would fail. Readers may grow weary of the avalanche of information, but Webb's stellar reputation in this red-hot field should generate demand.--Carr, Dane Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Trends can be profitably predicted, according to this windy treatise on business futurism. Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute consultancy, insists that prognosticating is a "learnable skill" and lays out a labyrinthine, acronym-heavy conceptual framework for pondering the future, featuring three rules, six instructions, 10 "sources of change," a six-part "CIPHER model,"and a six-part "F.U.T.U.R.E test" to "pressure-test any strategy created to address a technology trend." It all amounts to a tangle of vague truisms-rule one says, "The future is not predetermined, but rather woven together from numerous threads that are themselves being woven in the present"-that leave the impression that futurology is still a dark art navigable only by hiring experts such as the author. Webb's own predictions are sometimes bizarre-she asserts that drones will make America dependent on imported food and that "pods" hooked to maglev trains will replace airplanes-but when she's predicting trends in digital technology, which is most of the time, the future sounds both grandiose and boring. (Google, she reports, is "creating a ubiquitous exo-brain... that could anticipate my every need" and will eventually become "some kind of digital life assistant.") Webb's futurism is not compelling, but her insightful retrospectives on why some innovations succeeded and others failed make for an engaging study of technical trends of the past. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
How to forecast emerging technological tends.Dont confuse the trendy with trends, warns Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute. Unlike hip, shiny objects, trends persist and can change everything. They include self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and other phenomena that will deeply affect our lives. Too often, writes the author, leaders ignore the signals [of emerging trends], wait too long to take action, or plan for only one scenario. In this useful guide, she offers a systematic way to interpret events and foresee how they will shape the future. In brief: watch fringe areas, where new ideas emerge; uncover hidden patterns; determine whether a pattern is a trend; calculate its arrival time; plan scenarios to act on the trend; test your scenarios. Her detailed explanation of these simple-seeming steps is based on many years of experience advising organizations and will undoubtedly help leaders contemplate what lies ahead. The author makes clear how difficult it is to recognize forthcoming changes in an era when change is commonplace. Also, we tend to underplay the significance of something when it is not significant to our immediate frame of reference. Companies like Nintendo have listened to the signals, adapted to change, and lasted since the late 1800s. Digital Equipment Corporation, once a leading vendor of computer systems, failed to anticipate personal computing, with disastrous results. Similarly, BlackBerry failed, its products eclipsed by new trends. Webbs stories of these companies and her close examination of current trendiness help readers understand how certain fringe thinking is shaped by diverse external forces (wealth distribution, education, government, etc.) into genuine trends. We know Uber represents a trend because it leverages our basic human needs and desires in a meaningful way and aligns our human nature with emerging technologies and breakthrough inventions, she writes. Webb provides a logical way to sift through todays onslaught of events and information to spot coming changes in your corner of the world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
