David Weinberger “The Future’s New Future: How our paradigm of the future — and our strategies for managing it — are changing.”
There have been a handful of times in our history when the nature of the future has changed: not just its contents or its pace, but what we think the future is and how it works. David Weinberger, Ph.D., argues that we are at such an inflection point now. Progress is turning from an upwardly-tilted line into a fruitful brambles. Our new methods of prediction are essentially different from the Newtonian paradigm we carry in our heads. Our ideas about formulating strategy and making decisions have been transformed by the connectivity of the Net. Even our most basic assumption that the way to success is to anticipate the future and prepare for it is being challenged by online practices we now take for granted. Beneath all of these changes is a paradigm of the future according to which we succeed not by limiting possibilities but by making more of them. The result is a sense of the future enabled by our scaled technology that is closer to what we have always sensed is the truth about it.