The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything — a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come.

Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:

• Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.” — an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.


• The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.


• The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years — from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.


• A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.


• Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science — and are putting control of evolution in human hands.


• There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.

From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths — no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right.

“This is a great book. From political policy and economics to science and the most thorny ethical issues, Al Gore has stated the human condition and the issues we face forthrightly, fearlessly, and in easily understood language — and has said what must be done. I asked myself halfway through who else could have written a book of this magnitude. The only answer I could imagine was Jefferson.” E. O. Wilson, Harvard University, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"I'm a pro-growth supply-side economist, so my admiration for Al Gore may seem like an oxymoron. It's not. This book is amazingly rich in wisdom, practicality, and insight. Al Gore has a portfolio that warrants credibility and is an accomplished polymath who transcends ideology while turning our attention to big issues, big ideas, and big solutions. The Future frames the discussion whether you're conservative, agnostic, or liberal. It's a fascinating deep read." Arthur B. Laffer, Ph.D.

"Whether he's discussing cyberspace, the environment, science, or the economy, Al Gore presents in this book, with impressive breadth and well-researched depth, the challenges we have to meet to ensure that they become opportunities rather than threats. If you are concerned about the massive changes the world is just heading into, then you should read this book. If you aren't, then you must read it!" Tim Berners-Lee

Former vice president Al Gore is the chairman and co-founder of both Generation Investment Management and Current TV, is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and is on the board of directors of Apple Inc. He spends the majority of his time as chairman of the the Climate Reality Project. First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, Gore served eight years in the House, eight years in the U.S. Senate, and eight years as vice president of the United States, from 1993 to 2001. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and is the #1 bestselling author of An Inconvenient Truth and The Assault on Reason.