The Actionable Futurist® Podcast is a show all about the near-term future with actionable advice from a range of global experts.Your host is leading Futurist and AI Expert Andrew Grill, a dynamic and visionary tech leader with over three decades of experience steering technology companies towards innovative success.Known for his captivating global keynotes, Andrew offers practical and actionable advice, making him a trusted advisor at the board level for companies such as Vodafone, Adobe, DHL, Nike, Nestle, Bupa, Wella, Mars, Sanofi, Dell Technologies, and the NHS.His upcoming book “Digitally Curious” set for a 2024 release by Wiley, delves into how technology intertwines with society’s fabric and provides actionable advice for any audience across a broad range of topics.A former Global Managing Partner at IBM, five times TEDx speaker, and someone who has performed more than 550 times on the world stage he is no stranger to providing strategic advice to senior leaders across multiple industries.Andrew’s unique blend of an engineering background, digital advocacy, and thought leadership positions him as a pivotal figure in shaping the future of technology...
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episode 23: S4 Episode 23: Author Byron Reese on his latest book: Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think.
As a Futurist I get to explore new inventions and track the progress of all kinds of technologies. But how did we get so smart to be able to dream all of these things up? Until I interviewed Byron about his new book Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future — and Shape it I hadn’t given this any thought.
It is a fascinating read and looks at what makes the human mind so unique and also explores the three leaps in our history that made us who we are—and will change how you think about our future.
Clearly, we humans are radically different from the other creatures on this planet. But why?
Byron argues that we owe our special status to our ability to imagine the future and recall the past, escaping the perpetual present that all other living creatures are trapped in.
Envisioning human history as the development of a societal superorganism he names Agora, Reese shows us how this escape enabled us to share knowledge on an unprecedented scale, to predict—and eventually master—the future.
Thoughtful, witty, and compulsively readable, Reese unravels our history as an intelligent species in three acts:
Act I: Ancient humans undergo “the awakening,” developing the cognitive ability to mentally time-travel using language
Act II: In 17th century France, probability theory is born—a science for seeing into the future that we used to build the modern world
Act III: Beginning with the invention of the computer chip, humanity creates machines to gaze into the future with even more precision, overcoming the limits of our brain
The book is a fresh new look at the history and destiny of humanity, you will come away from Stories, Dice, and Rocks that Think with a new understanding of what they are—not just another animal, but a creature with a mastery of time itself.
We also discussed:
- What is a Futurist?
- Why Byron wrote the book
- The structure of the book into 3 acts
- Pascal's 1654 moment on reasoning & Probability
- Human brain capacity in 1654 vs now
- The 21 told stories
- The power of storytelling
- Are we being overloaded with stories?
- What about "fake news" and untrue stories?
- Act 3: The rocks that think
- What will the next 50 years look like?
- Where will AI help us innovate?
- The half-life of a job
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Actionable advice for predicting your future
More on Byron
Byron's website
Byron on Twitter
Buy the book
Your Host: Actionable Futurist® & Chief Futurist Andrew Grill
For more on Andrew - what he speaks about and recent talks, please visit ActionableFuturist.com
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Keynote speeches here
Andrew's upcoming book