Henry Ford on the future
by Slava on Mar.25, 2011, under 6 future congeries
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Surprisingly for myself, I was most impressed by the ideas about the futures by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company and a (now increasingly hated) father of ‘mass production’. He is often portrayed as an arrogant dumb-ass allowing “any colour as long as it is black”. In reality he was a much more sophisticated thinker (and practitioner, of course), which is only confirmed by his views here.
“Perhaps our most progressive step will be the discovery that we have not made so much progress as the chatter of the times would suggest” – you rarely expect such humbleness from the tycoons of today. Benefiting massively from technology and science, he was rather skeptical about their role to improve our lives in the future (at least, technology and science alone). Whether a father of allegedly dehumanizing mass production or not, his words may well be the motto for the coming century of ‘humanizing technologies’: – “The newest thing in the world is the human being. And the greatest changes are to be looked for in him”.
