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LET'S REWRITE THE FUTURE
BBC Focus - Science & Technology
|January 2021
By repeating the mistakes of the past, we’re dooming the future. It’s time to come up with some new ideas
Can you believe it’s been a year since the pandemic first shut normal operations down? While we continue to grapple with our new beginning and what stories we will tell about the past, I want to tell a story about the future.
In 2016, I started a writing project codenamed ‘Teach your toddler to type: a toolkit for the 21st Century’. The title was a deliberate provocation aimed at mum blogs, who I predicted would read it at face value and call me the devil for suggesting we replace pen and paper with keyboard shortcuts. In fact, it wasn’t a parenting manual, but an intervention in outdated ideas about the future that were hamstrung by intractable legacy thinking.
This story is from the January 2021 edition of BBC Focus - Science & Technology.
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