Prediction is a dangerous game — the future is never a straight, linear extrapolation from the present. Unexpected innovations and events will conspire to trip up the best-laid plans — but it’s better than not thinking about the future at all.

This updated and revised edition of Future Files is filled with provocative forecasts about how the world might change in the next half century. It examines emerging patterns and developments in society, technology, economy, and business, and makes educated speculations as to where they might take us.

But Future Files is not primarily about prediction. Its goal is to liberate our collective and individual imaginations so that we can see the familiar in a new light and the unfamiliar with greater clarity, and to make us all — individuals and organisations — think about where we are going and to consider whether, when we get there, it will be worth staying.

Future Files will prove indispensable to business analysts, strategists, and organisations, and provides rich and fascinating material for us all to contemplate as we rush headlong into the future.