Customer Reviews

The Extreme Future: The Top Trends That Will Reshape the World for the Next 5, 10, and 20 Years

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3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The author makes many speculative and outlandish predictions of the future. His sheer number of intuitive predictions will allow him to be right on many matters, but very off on some.

What is lacking are analysis and technical details of why the future will be the way the author claims. For example, he claims lack of energy supply and technological progress will bring forth an age of hydrogen powered cars and fusion nuclear reactors. Yet, he provides no technical reasons why these two technologies will dominate the energy industry. Just how will we manage to produce hydrogen in large concentration and quantities which will be cost effective when it takes MORE energy to produce concenttrated hydrogen today than the energy value of the hydrogen themselves? Also, since when was controlled nuclear fusion reactors even possible? An explaination of how we will overcome the technical hurdles is missing throughout this book.

Some of the claims are downright outlandish. For example, the author claims we will have teleporter which will transfer objects throughout the globe. Again, the missing piece is of any scientific backing or explaination.

Some of the predictions are based on facts, and therefore, have strong predictive value. For example, the author claims that we will have a skilled worker shortage well into 2025 and beyond. This is based on a solid demographic data which indicates that we will have a shrinking workforce of suitable age in America.

Finally, the author is a PhD, but he never says on what subject. He also seems to compare himself to Da Vinci.....He claims many of his previous predictions were right on target. But I imagine many of his predictions were dead off target as well. The sheer number of predictions in this book will allow the author to claim that he is a futurist because many of his predictions will probably come true. Just don't expect him to backup his claims with solid science, facts, or analysis.

The book contains a lot of preening; the author seems to think it is important to remind us (anecdotally) how many huge companies and heads-of-state he's interacted with. Many of his predictions range from poorly explored (he talks about a hydrogen fuel economy without addressing the fact that hydrogen is just a transport--not a readily available source of energy) to the absurd (predictions that teleportation will be available within decades, given the fact of photonic teleportation which doesn't even slightly approach the complexity of disintegrating, transporting and reintegrating an object!) There's also a lot of political advocacy here; I'd have simply preferred an analysis of technological and cultural trends along with research to back it up.

As I read this book I am reminded of the old saying that 'forecasting the future is easy, it's being right that's hard.'

Dr. Canton breaks down his forecasts into ten areas. Some of them I find very good. Some of them I find OK. Some of them I disagree with. Some of them I'd replace with others.

His view of the future of the individual, Chapter 10, I find totally agreeable. He says that protecting the freedom and rights of the individual is going to be difficult. I absolutely agree. There will be a great deal of pressure to restrict rights (the so called Patriot's Act) in the name of security. The Democrats would like to impose gun control. The Republicans would like to impose abortion control.

His view on energy I find half right. He is right that we are running out of energy. Oil will get progressively more expensive. Then he says, 'Hydrogen is the most plentiful gas in the universe...It's abundant, reliable, renewable, clean and secure because hydrogen is everywhere, America wouldn't have to rely on foreign suppliers.' Yes, but hydrogen isn't a fuel, it's a way to store energy. You have to put more energy into separating hydrogen from oxygen (where it's mostly found, i.e. water) than you get back when you burn it. Nuclear power is the only forseeable place to get the energy to put into hydrogen, and we still have problems of where to store the old fuel rods, do you want them in your back yard?

He sees medicine making all kinds of advances that will lead to longer and healthier lives. I'm not so sure. AIDS is likely to move up to #3 in killing people in the next few years, and there's no cure in sight. Drug resistent forms of TB, malaria, etc. are spreading. New potential diseases like avian flu. If you're interested I'd recommend 'The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance' by Laurie Garrett. It's a bit old, but still the best on the subject.

This is a fun book to read. It will be even more fun to see how correct it turns out to be.

I was very disappointed with this book. Between his shameless plugs for his speaking engagements and various other activities, the author pulls together various thoughts, statistics, and projections that could easily be synthesized by reading a few choice periodicals. If you are a reader in search of innovative thoughts about the future that may help guide your worldview, company, or investments, I would advise you to look elsewhere. I will not read another work by this author.

The Extreme Future is a fantastic feast of ideas. So many books about the future are predictable or simply boring. This book is a whole other experience. Canton's mind is a non-stop treasure trove of complex insights, wild ideas, brain-stretching posssibilities and just plain fun. I wholeheartedly recommend The Extreme Future to anyone who would like to step outside the box and look at everything - from global politics to mind control to enhanced humans - in some pretty incredible ways.

Before I get into the bad stuff about this book (because there's a lot of it), I want to explain why I liked this book. The author does a better job than other futurists in bringing together many different fields of ideas about the future -- from politics, to education, to economics, to science and technology, and so on. There is a lot more variety of information here than any one person can be expected to know. If you haven't heard a prediction about the future before, this book will be jam-packed with information that will shock you. Personally, I had never heard of the Metaverse before, and was very impressed by being introduced to the concept in this book. Also, I didn't know that people actually take teleportation to be a serious possibility in the near future. Dr. Canton throws out well over a hundred little predictions like these that can be very interesting at times. Another point in the book's favor is that the author mostly avoids predicting over 20 years into the future, which appears to be impossible to do if you look at the major turning points that have happened every 10-20 years or so throughout United States history. Avoiding far-off predictions and sticking mostly to the year 2020 and before makes the predictions more likely to happen than saying what will happen in 2080.

Although I would recommend reading this book for the previously mentioned great little tidbits of information, the author leaves much to be desired here as well. The first and most obnoxious problem with this book is that the author sounds like he's trying to sell me something about a dozen times throughout the book -- most often he seems to be selling his own credibility. Sometimes he starts a prediction of the future with statements like "I dined with the leader of such-and-such nation and he said..." or "I gave a presentation to U.S. government officials at such-and-such important sounding location...". An even worse sounding introduction and more shameless plug for his own wisdom is when he brags about how he threw out an idea to his sister-in-law and she allegedly started a multi-million dollar international company with his one-sentence advice ("thoughtfully" providing the reader with a link to her business). He also claims to have predicted the anthrax scare of the early 2000's and to have *almost* boarded the flight on 9/11 that tried to crash into the Pentagon, which somehow makes him an expert on the matter. These statements come off as outright bragging and a desperate plea for why the author's opinion matters. His opinions would sound far more important if they were insightful and free of thinly-veiled sales pitches.

Speaking of insightful, the author seems to borrow from others without any credit or enhancement to the ideas. He has a section similarly titled to "Jihad vs. McWorld" with pretty much the exact same thing that the book by that title said in the 1990s -- only the author doesn't mention that that is an actual book. When the author explains the Metaverse, he attributes it to Sony's apparently failed attempt to create it in 2006; there is no mention of the book "Snow Crash" that originated the idea. Instead of leading the readers to the author's own sources of his future predictions, he seems to be determined to appear as if he came up with all these ideas himself.

Plagiarism is one thing, as long as it's accurate...but I found at least one instance where the author was blatantly wrong. When discussing how far medicine has improved human standards of living in recent history, the author states that Socrates died at 35 years old in order to prove that our average lifespan of 75 nowadays is remarkable. The problem is, Socrates died at 70 years old, and that was by suicide. Any quick look at Plato's dialogues or Googling the question would bring this fact up, but the author still claims it to be 35. If the author can't even get this simple research topic right, I wonder what other facts he misrepresented, or just plain made up. It is an unacceptable error for a doctor.

Some chapters in this book are much better than others. For example, the science and technology chapter is very good and informative. The chapter on alternative energy got me thinking, even if experts in the field seem less sure about the future of energy than Dr. Canton does. Some of the chapters are practically common knowledge by now, like how China is rising rapidly. The chapter on terrorism comes off as a bunch of fear-mongering, and the chapter on security of personal freedoms sounds like its primary sources are conspiracy theorists bent on hating every camera they come across. The final chapter of the book, which claims that America can be great or ruined by 2015 based on dramatic choices, is just plain bad. Now that 2015 is only four years away, it appears that the author was being ridiculous in thinking that America would be drastically different in its global position in 2015 than in 2006, good or bad. In fact, America seems just about in the same situation it was then.

I would recommend reading this book if you'd like to hear ideas about what might happen in the near future. The author throws out about 250 ideas (maybe much more, maybe less) in the book, sometimes 20 per page, so he's bound to be right about something in it. Based on his writing style in this book, however, he will take these few ideas that prove to be true and claim how expert his advice will be based on those few, and not the hundreds that didn't actually happen. Although reading the book made me feel like I was listening to a very long, very repetitive PowerPoint presentation, I am glad I read it for the tidbits here and there that gave me new ideas about what might happen in my lifetime, and I'm sure you will feel the same way if you read it as well.

To set your expectations of my opinion: This is the poorest piece of business literature I have read in at least a few years, if not ever.

This book provides a series of short-term to long-term predictions about the future across a variety of relevant topics (energy, peace, etc.). There are so many predictions, and so many topics, that it is hard for the reader to disagree with the author consistently because, when a shotgun approach is used for speculation, there is no room for debate.

Where this book falls tragically short is its lack of analysis. For 95% of the authors predictions, there is absolutely no analysis or rationale for the forecast. In fact, in many instances, the author uses uncited speculation in the form of unfounded matter-of-fact statements (e.g. "Japan is of course buying up land in China"). The only attempt to provide any sense of rationale to any of the author's arguments are a series of convoluded frameworks which, after using frameworks during my day-to-day job as a management consultant for the past 5 years, still make absolutely no sense to me.

Readers who are interested in speculation about the future would be much better off picking up a science-fiction book set in the not-to-distance future and using that creativity to spark their own imaginations. Science-fiction writers are generally visionaries as well; the only difference is, the reader will not have to be subjected to reading unfounded fiction presented as fact by a CEO who, for better or worse, has no more credentials on this topic than any other writer.

I heard about this book during a presentation by Howard Rheingold at a Rotary Honolulu luncheon. I jotted the name of the book down and bought a copy.

This book has given me a broadened perspective on where our world is today in regards to business, technology, medicine, security, terrorism, population, immigration, the environment, energy, and even what it may mean to be human during the remainder of this century and beyond.

The book is divided into 12 chapters. The first chapter sets the premise: The future can be extreme. The future can be bright, or it can be dark. The concept of "Future-Readiness" is introduced, and how the degree of awareness and readyness can change the probable outcome of the future. Dr. Canton also describes a process of looking at the future to determine the extremes, the causes of the extremes, and thus the choices that can be made today to shape the future.

The next eight chapters address various factors which we are living with today which will have a bearing on how the future develops. These topics include: Energy, Prosperity/Poverty, Human Capital, Medicine, Environment, Globalization, Security, and Advanced Science.

The last three chapters serve to pull together the information in the first nine chapters to "plug in the crystal ball" and examine how the confluence of factors will impact the future of the individual, and the global future with an emphasis on China and the U.S.

Granted, there are some pretty wild and imaginative "predictions" of specific inventions, such as teleportation of matter, but the public thought Leonardo DaVinci crazed when he suggested that people could fly with the aid of machines.

For me, the chapter with the most impact was the last chapter: The Future of America and Democracy. This chapter is a "call to service" for America, and the world. It very powerfully urges that we the people, government and business, consider taking certain actions to address the challenges that face our communities, our nation, our world, and humanity.

This was both a thoroughly enlightening and entertaining read. Two years after publication, this book is prescient and timely reading for anyone who wonders "Where are we going?", "How are we going to get there?", "What could go wrong?", but most importantly "What can we do?".

not too much to add to what others have written. I liked the ideas put forth in this book. I hope the predicted good things happen and the not so good things do not. either way, it definitely makes one think and imagine what the future may bring.

Gone are the days where companies could cut costs and survive. Companies who take this narrow minded approach will cease to exist in tomorrow's economy. Innovation is rapidly becoming a key strategic driver for survival, leave along competitive edge. This book clears indicates that the new "Innovation Economy" - a new convergence of economics, trade, and technology, will determine the future leadership of nations, productivity of business, and wealth of individuals.

Chapter 3 - "Finding Prosperity: The innovation economy" states that this innovation economy will represent the largest future threat or opportunity for your career or business.

I think the general trends stated in this book seem to be pretty much on target, for instance the top industries who will benefit the most will be pharma/health, energy, and manufacturing. Education is ranked # 8. Ratings may be true from a global perspective but at least for the US, as we know very well from Obama's priorities for the next 5 years, it is healthcare, energy and "education".

If you are a staunch believer in innovation and would like to know where to invest in the future, this book will serve as an interesting read and open your eyes, especially, around how seriously we need to take innovation.

Hope you enjoyed the review.

- Avi Jhangiani
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