An intriguing and cheerful look at ways that innovation may reshape society.
Entrepreneur Bhargava and consultant Coutinho-Mason predict new patterns for work and society in this debut nonfiction work.
The future is already here—it just hasn’t gone mainstream yet. That’s the philosophy undergirding the work of the two authors of this book, who make it their business to know where, in the present, the seeds of the future are already beginning to sprout: “What is happening on the edges of most industries or in society—the technological marvels, the ambitious innovations, the bold social agendas—hold the potential to become mainstream in the future, to change how we’ll live and work and what we’ll value,” they write in their introduction. Some of these ideas have already filtered into the popular consciousness, even if they haven’t become routine for everyone, such as remote work, the medical use of psychedelics, and plant-based meat. Others will likely strike readers as completely novel; in the future, the authors assert, children may get a substantial portion of their education passively by playing video games embedded with stealth learning technology. If one lives alone, they say, one may rely on Siri-like virtual assistants, trained to offer people emotional support and companionship. Large companies, in order to better integrate themselves into the community, may invite nonprofits, local businesses, and artists to share their office space, the authors note, and one’s city may be redesigned so that all the places one needs to go daily—work, home, school, parks—are within a 15-minute commute. The new urban center may feature vertical forests—skyscrapers filled with trees and plants to relegate their temperature and muffle noise—and vertical farms, and biotechnology may replace plastic, making products waste-free. This might sound like the stuff of SF, but with each chapter, the authors introduce readers to concepts that make the future seem less dystopian—and right around the corner.
This present-is-future philosophy is why Bhargava and Coutinho-Mason jokingly refer to themselves as “now-ists” rather than futurists. Their prose reflects the optimism and enthusiasm they feel for each new idea, as when they discuss the pre-owned clothes marketplace Depop: “Digital secondhand marketplaces also allow people to flaunt their entrepreneurialism as a key source of status too. If eBay is the Goodwill of the digital secondhand fashion world (huge, functional, but unsexy and hard to navigate) then fashion marketplaces like Depop are its younger, more creative, cooler cousin.” Chapters generally introduce an emerging trend or technology and then highlight an organization or company that’s currently putting it into practice. If there’s a knock on Bhargava and Coutinho-Mason’s method, it’s that they sometimes come across as a bit too rosy in their assessments. For example, the authors choose to focus on how much time artificial intelligence technologies can save artists—highlighting a movie trailer that was made in hours instead of weeks—without addressing how that saved time will likely mean a smaller paycheck. In general, however, these now-ists succeed in making the future a little less scary and a lot more exciting.
Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781646870653
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
