Welcome to Future Imperfect

Books, humility and King Arthur.

Author newsletters are funny things because they are primarily marketing tools designed to encourage readers to buy an author’s books yet I, like many authors, find talking about my own work a most peculiar form of torture. See me at a convention or event and you’ll probably think ‘there’s a confident guy’, but I get so anxious about public speaking I’ll have physical symptoms and have to fight the urge to run and hide.

And don’t get me started on readings.

Getting over my introvert tendencies by interviewing Louis Theroux

So why do it? Well, it’s part of the job and I’ve developed coping mechanisms. I’m a natural introvert who has learned the characteristics of an extrovert over the years because we live in a world that rewards extroverts.

‘Look at me’ doesn’t come naturally, but I love learning and sharing what I’ve discovered, so I’ll happily have conversations with friends, family, cab drivers or visiting Jehovah’s Witnesses about anything from how gravity changes time, the psychology of radicalization or the technologies that underpin genetic medicine. And that’s what this Substack is intended to be, a conversation.

There will still be the ‘buy my book’ stuff, because I think my publishers will disown me if I don’t at least try to overcome my introvert tendencies. That content will all be available to free subscribers. Paid subscribers will get access to insights and features on social, economic, and technological trends and methods of thinking that might help them navigate the modern world.

For the time starved, the title ‘Future Imperfect’ gives a clue about the general direction of this Substack. I’ll spend most of it looking at the future, delving into history for lessons we can learn, but not being bound by it. Every so often society becomes hooked on history, reaching back to past glories and supposedly inviolable traditions, rather like a child reaches for a comfort blanket. We live in just such a time now with the growth of traditionalist and conservative movements that seek to anchor us to old concepts of social order. These periods tend to coincide with political and economic strife, and instead of clinging to the safety of what came before, I think we need to be creative and come up with our own means of defining and dealing with the life we face.

The imperfect part of the title is a recognition of our inherent flaws as human beings, and too often in this fast-paced, combative, black and white world, it’s easy to forget we aren’t perfect, and we don’t have all the answers. Brash talk show hosts, religious leaders, political activists pretend to have all the answers, but they don’t. The pretence is designed to achieve an objective. It might be to keep us distracted from the real issues, or to create social pressure about an issue that is useful to them, but once they’ve achieved their objective, they will move on and all that will be left in their wake is division. It’s important to remember our inherent imperfections when we’re presented with someone else’s vision of a perfect world for two reasons.

First, anyone selling a perfect solution is likely to be unaware of, or concealing, a litany of challenges and imperfections. We need to avoid being sucked in by simple, catchy solutions.

Second, imperfect applies to everyone, including ourselves. Humility is valuable, and an awareness of the imperfections of one’s own worldview can aid dialogue and critical thinking. If we think our view of the world is always right, we close ourselves to growth and learning and draw firm boundaries that encourage conflict rather than dialogue.

Life is an experience, and the experience of life changes us. I went to see Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur in the cinema and hated it. Watched it with my wife Amy and our three children, Maya, Thomas, and Elliot recently and we all loved it. What changed? Me. Not one second of the film was any different.

It’s a very basic way of demonstrating that subjective knowledge, even about ourselves and our tastes, is changeable. It’s also a way to introduce my family because people tell me it’s important to forge a connection with others beyond the cerebral and that introducing family will make me be more human. And in the age of artificial intelligence, being human, rather than attempting to seem human, will become increasingly important.

We live in a world in which we are all connected to an extent never previously experienced in human history. An event in a small village in Nepal can be recorded on a phone, uploaded to social media and spread around the world in minutes. An infectious disease can originate in China and, despite extensive quarantine and mitigation measures, infect most of the global population in less than two years. We face huge challenges in the form of climate change and artificial intelligence, and have medical, data and physical technologies at our disposal that most politicians can’t even begin to understand.

And we’re still using an archaic political system that divides government and opposition, encouraging politicians to present catchy, simplistic, clear-cut solutions, and we decide who gets the reins of power based on a popularity contest that rewards bluster and confidence over ability and diligence. The world of the extrovert.

It’s beyond time for our political and social structures to evolve and adapt to match not just the huge advances made in technology, medicine, and engineering but also the scale of challenge now facing humanity. I don’t claim to have any answers, but this Substack will be an exploration of the issues facing us, and the first step towards any kind of solution is recognising the need for something different.

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