“Inventing the Future”
In 1963, Dennis Gabor published “Inventing the Future,” a book that contained his most famous quote: “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” We are still the masters of our fate. Rational thinking, even assisted by any conceivable electronic computers, cannot predict the future. All it can do is to map out the probability space as it appears at the present and which will be different tomorrow when one of the infinities of possible states will have materialized. Technological and social inventions are broadening this probability space all the time; it is now incomparably larger than it was before the industrial revolution—for good or for evil.