The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight

By Thomas Suddendorf, Jon Redshaw and Adam Bulley

The first trade book dedicated to the emergence of foresight, how this prodigious capacity drove human evolution and how we’ll continue to rely and improve on it in the future

Chimpanzees grunt excitedly to say hello. But our closest animal cousins never say goodbye. In fact humans may well be the only animals who bid one another farewell in mutual recognition that we are going our separate ways, and in the hope our paths may cross again. 

Your mind is a virtual time machine. You can relive past events and imagine future possibilities – even ones that you have never experienced or which may never materialize. Because you are a mental time traveller, you can prepare for threats and opportunities well in advance and deliberately shape the future to your own design. Humans run the zoos not because we are stronger than other animals, but because we can foresee what these animals need and what they can do. Foresight is essential to our dominance on the planet.

In The Invention of Tomorrow, three pioneering researchers in the field of mental time travel provide a ground-breaking exploration of one of humanity’s greatest powers, showing that humans are fundamentally a species of farsighted vision, not one of myopia and impulsivity. Far from being unequipped to deal with the challenges it now faces, our species has evolved to deal with future dangers more than any other creature that has ever existed. 

An avalanche of discoveries in the past decade has dramatically transformed our understanding of our mental time machines and how we use them to envisage, predict and control the future. Drawing on cutting-edge research from many disciplines, The Invention of Tomorrow tells a revolutionary story of discovery that is providing a new perspective on the story of humanity.