The Future cover art

The Future

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Try for £0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Future

By: Nick Montfort
Narrated by: Sean Pratt
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

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 Internet Invention
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Code Economy cover art
A Brief History of the Future of Education cover art
Artificial Intelligence and You cover art
The Artist in the Machine cover art
Utopia Is Creepy cover art
Cataloging the World cover art
Artificial Intelligence cover art
AI Narratives cover art
Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier cover art
Program or Be Programmed cover art
The 4th Revolution cover art
Radical Technologies cover art
Artificial Intelligence cover art
How To Talk To Robots cover art
She’s in CTRL cover art
Artificial Intelligence cover art

What listeners say about The Future

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

A history of attempts to predict the future

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...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!