The Future is as ambitious and erudite as it is sprawling. Although it is targeted at a North American audience, Gore takes the reader through leaps in millennia to paint a wide-ranging and intercontinental portrait of our geological, political, and cultural history, if only so that he can differentiate this current period from those that have preceded it. The book is cleaved into six chapters that reflect what Gore regards as the drivers of global change: ‘Earth, Inc.’; ‘The Global Mind’; ‘Power in the Balance’; ‘Outgrowth’; ‘The Reinvention of Life and Death’; and ‘The Edge’. Typical of Gore’s style, each of these chapters is prefaced by a flow chart that draws together seemingly interconnected events in the history of the world. St Augustine, for instance, is used to illustrate the difference between linear and exponential change. A squiggle links ‘the reinvention of life and death’ with the phenomenon of Adderall-ingesting college students. There is a fair slew of fuzzy neologisms, too: ‘wantology’ is how he refers to society’s pathological consumption problem; ‘demo-sclerosis’ is his prognosis of a global democracy being devoured by corporate interests and lobby groups.

Our present-day circumstances, according to Gore, are symptomatic of a phenomenon he calls ‘hyper-change’, where the velocity of technological upheaval is upending each facet of our lives. This revolution, Gore writes, is ‘now carrying us with it at a speed beyond our imagining toward ever newer technologically shaped realities that often appear, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, “indistinguishable from magic”’. Some of the realities include ‘robosourcing’, the process of outsourcing jobs to machines, and ‘interspecies sexting’, which is Gore’s humorous reference to a herd of cows in Switzerland, whose genitals have been hooked up to the Internet to track their oestrous cycle to help with breeding. The Future is filled with sophisticated and accessible factoids such as these, tailor-made for dinner-party conversations. The Simpsons episode featuring Homer reading the Economist comes to mind, where he turns to Marge and says somewhat boastfully: ‘Did you know Indonesia is at a crossroads?’

Similar to the Economist, The Future is prone to sweeping vision statements and to diagnosing corrective policy measures to fix our failures. It must be said that Gore does a solid job of identifying these failures. But the fruits of his deduction are hardly revelatory. (For example: technology is restructuring the workforce! The economic ascent of developing countries is contributing to worsening carbon emissions!) Instead, The Future works best as a compendium of geopolitical, environmental, scientific, and technological history, but is less successful in policy prescriptions. His voluminous digressions on globalisation – the growth of transnational corporations, supply chains, and communications are culminating in what he calls ‘Earth, Inc.’ – have been around since the 1980s.

Fans of Gore would probably argue that it is the content rather than the prose that matters. But if one is going to address the content, then Gore’s involvement in TED conferences should be talked about. Gore has hosted them multiple times, and his popularity owes much to the technocratic liberalism that infects not only TED, but also the arguments of many commentators on the centre left. What the world needs now, TED conveners and leftish wonks suggest, are charismatic technocrats, who approach broken institutions – economies, countries, anything really – as if they were broken websites. Sober-minded experts, often at a remove from contemporary political, historical, or social contexts, can provide a technocratic solution. There is no doubting that the intentions are good, and the simplicity is appealing. TED’s motto is ‘ideas worth spreading’; it is not uncommon to see a TED talk turn into a viral sensation and then into a book. What happens is that the resulting technological discourse often becomes a meme; the message becomes lost in the regeneration and remixing process.

Indeed, Gore’s vision of the future does suffer, in no small way, from the inevitable memefication of his ideas, much in the same vein as futurist Alvin Toffler’s manifesto Future Shock (1970). Certainly, the idea of technology (or globalisation, for that matter) as an irresistible and exogenous force is a clear mark of his admiration of Toffler, whose brand of futurism is characteristically heavy on buzzwords. By tipping his hat to Toffler, Gore overstates technology’s autonomy and understates human agency. Gore tells the reader about the work of scientists at the University of Guelph, who attempted to create genetically engineered pigs by introducing mouse DNA into their genomes so that they could reduce the amount of phosphorus in their faeces. They were affectionately dubbed ‘Enviropigs’, because phosphorus is a source of algal blooms, which in turn create ‘dead zones’ in marine environments. But there was significant opposition to eating the by-products of the Enviropig and scientists ‘elsewhere engineered an enzyme that … accomplished the same result’. The Enviropigs, we learn, were eventually euthanised.

One cannot fault Gore for trying to predict the future through the widest lens possible. Some ‘10,000 pages of research’ contribute to an exhaustive primer on the global economy, changing demography, climate crises, digital and biotech revolutions, and health and medicine.

Unfortunately, much of it is dull and earnest. It is not until Gore addresses the current state of US politics that we see something resembling genuine anger. When he talks about the role of Super PACs in subverting the political agenda, it is almost as if he is invoking the past presidential tense. ‘Democracy has been hacked’ by corporations, he says – and he would know. In January this year, Gore sold his television network, Current TV, to Qatar-government-owned Al-Jazeera for US$500 million. The deal has reportedly made him richer than Mitt Romney. The future might be challenging for the rest of the world, but it sure is bright for Gore, Inc.