The Future: Slow Down or Go Faster? By Ron Immink, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of The Future: Slow Down or Go Faster? Kindle Edition by Ron Immink (Author). Available from Amazon here.

A perspective on predicting the future – future trends, unpredictability, the mindset and some tools and books to use – brought to you by Bookbuzz and Strategy Crowd.

This is an interesting book by one of our regular contributors, and Fintech20 judge Ron Immink. He is looking at what the future might look like in 2022, which is a good, near term time frame to take. Five years away, is far enough to make some interesting predictions and observations, with enough time to allow for things to actually change. By then drawing on a wider range of books looking to predict the future, including several we have read and reviewed, Ron then draws on a wider range of insights and ideas. For busy people who don’t have time to read all of the books mentioned this is a good primer and overview.

The section on trends is illuminating, if not a little worrying too, suggesting that we are becoming more autistic, fearful, alone and less intelligent! The challenge of offloading our intelligence to handheld devices, does ask some important questions in terms of how we continue to ensure we are using this to creatively problem solve, and make us smarter, not dumber. Ron highlights the need to consider potential social changes and challenges, and the concept of trying to achieve Gross National Happiness targets.

In many ways Ron has done the work for you, with this book you can then get to absorb the benefits of the insights he has gathered from all of these books. Personally I would actually like to read many of them for myself, but this high level summarisation still offers great value as he has covered many books I hadn’t even heard of too. In many ways this is a perfect book to be a kindle, as it is one to dip into, zoom through and then perhaps go and buy some of them to read in hard copy.

Buy it!

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