possibility studies

This prompted me to review many of the hundreds of books published each year on society, economics and politics. While many offer a striking diagnosis, most offer little in the way of prescription, which is usually left to a final chapter.

Collectively, we also need pictures of societal futures that go beyond today’s status quo. They complement but do not replace the necessary work of activism that fights against the injustices of the present. We also need new answers to new problems—the vulnerabilities caused by a more connected world, or by potentially lethal artificial

We cannot know when the time will be ripe for any particular idea. The task of creators is to keep options alive and open and not to be too constrained by the limitations of a present that may be suddenly transformed—by a depression, war, a dramatic collapse of political trust, or a pandemic.

The book focuses on a simple question: how could we become better at imagining the society in which we might like to live a generation or two from now?

Of course, possibility beliefs can, and often do, derive from abstract self-beliefs as we get older. But also, simple beliefs about possible actions and their limits might precede, and contribute to, the construction of our self-efficacy, our mindsets, and our identities over time.

Countries that used to define themselves through creating bold new institutions no longer do so—there are no recent equivalents to the NHS or the BBC in Britain; no equivalents of NASA or DARPA in the US. In much of academic life, too, you are more likely to succeed by slightly tweaking an established idea than creating a novel one.18

What if imagining and even engaging with the impossible has actually become a necessity? In the current landscape of geopolitical events, climate change, and other accumulating societal challenges, it seems that we are stuck in our inability to perceive and respond to emergence. The call for urgency, the awareness that technology is changing

There is an audacity in focusing on the possible in an age of major personal and societal impossibilities.