Showing titles in Future Studies

Most people think about technology as something we created to serve us, but we may well be getting to the point where we are the ones who're serving an ever more sophisticated technology. With pragmatism and optimism, Dr Tim Sharp, aka Dr Happy, outlines strategies and tools to build your confidence to positively cope with the modern world.

In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, Cohn considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. All Societies Die points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. Cohn takes us on an easily digestible journey through history. While he unveils the past, his message to us about the present is searing.

Former Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen was among the earliest to write about the dangers that the Internet poses to our culture and society. His 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur was critical in helping advance the conversation around the Internet, which has now morphed from a tool providing efficiencies and opportunities for consumers and business to an elemental force that is profoundly reshaping our societies and our world.

Where Will Man Take Us? explores the changes technology is bringing about in us - as a society and as a species. What will the next generation turn into, what will it be like, how will the new Adam and Eve live and love? In this audiobook, Atul Jalan tackles nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and genetics, seamlessly weaving the future of technology with the changing dynamics of human love, morality, and ethics.

Today, Elon Musk's SpaceX is building one human-rated reusable spacecraft every week designed to send 100 colonists to Mars on each voyage. With this brilliant plan, SpaceX aims to colonize the Red Planet. This is not science fiction. These ships are in construction every day at a startling pace in order to make humanity a multiplanetary species, beginning this decade. Departing Earth Forever is the first manual written to and for Martian colonists—and for humankind back on the home planet witnessing this single most historic and momentous event in human history.

Unsere Welt steht an einem Kipp-Punkt, und wir spüren es. Einerseits geht es uns so gut wie nie, andererseits zeigen sich Verwerfungen, Zerstörung und Krise, wohin wir sehen. Ob Umwelt oder Gesellschaft - scheinbar gleichzeitig sind unsere Systeme unter Stress geraten. Wir ahnen: So wie es ist, wird und kann es nicht bleiben. Wie finden wir zu einer Lebensweise, die das Wohlergehen des Planeten mit dem der Menschheit versöhnt? Wo liegt der Weg zwischen Verbotsregime und Schuldfragen auf der einen und Wachstumswahn und Technikversprechen auf der anderen Seite?

Paul A. Pagnato has tapped into an incredible brain trust of world-renowned experts from a diverse set of challenging disciplines, each having encountered the intersection of exponential growth and transparency. Their honest assessment for turning challenges into opportunities is inspirational. Their work is changing the world, and now through the prism of transparency, the wave of the future is upon us.

Following the massive international success "The Netocrats" and its ambitious follow-up "The Global Empire", in this third installment of the "Futurica Trilogy", Bard and Söderqvist approach something far more personal - the fragile human being herself and, most of all, her brain. "The Body Machines", with a title borrowed from René Descartes, explains what a brain is, how it has developed and how it functions, and why it spends such an incredible amount of time and energy on fooling itself.

David Christian, historian and best-selling author of Origin Story, is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past. But with Future Stories, he casts his sharp analytical eye forward, offering an introduction to the strange world of the future, and a guide to what we think we know about it at all scales, from the predictive mechanisms of single-celled organisms and tomato plants to the merging of colossal galaxies billions of years from now.

Best-selling author Newt Gingrich proposes a bold vision ofthe future: America is on the cusp of a renaissance, a new birth of technological and scientific innovation that will dramatically transform the prosperity and quality of life of every American. Our biggest enemy? Special interest groups, powerful lobbyists, and government bureaucrats who aredetermined to squash, control, or prevent these innovations - and permanently change the future of America.

The planet says we consume too much: in North America, we burn the Earth's resources at a rate five times faster than they can regenerate. And despite our efforts to "green" our consumption - by recycling, increasing energy efficiency, or using solar power - we have yet to see a decline in global carbon emissions.

For years we’ve been inundated with bleak forecasts about the future. But in this electrifying new book, author Byron Reese debunks the pessimistic outlook as dangerous, and shows instead how technology will soon create a dramatically better world for every person on earth, beyond anything we have dared to imagine. With the art of a storyteller, Reese synthesizes history, technology, and sociology into an exciting, fast-moving narrative that shows how technological change has had dramatic effects on humanity in the past.

Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.

Weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting, figuring out "what's for dinner on Mars" is far from trivial. If we can figure out how to sustain ourselves on Mars, we will know how to do it on Earth too. In Dinner on Mars, authors Fraser and Newman show how setting the table off-planet will supercharge efforts to produce food sustainably here at home. For futurists, sci-fi geeks, tech nuts, business leaders, and anyone interested in the future of food, Dinner on Mars puts sustainability and adaptability on the menu in the face of our climate crisis.

Future Imperfect describes and discusses technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain.

Academic, physicist, environmental expert and award-winning science communicator Paul Behrens presents a radical analysis of a civilisation on the brink of catastrophe. Setting out the pressing existential threats we face, he writes, in alternating chapters, of what the future could look like at its most pessimistic and hopeful. In lucid and clear-sighted prose, Behrens argues that structural problems need structural solutions and examines critical areas in which political will is required, including women's education, food and energy security, biodiversity and economics.

Imagine an imminent future where American voters are bombarded with personalized political messages from every smart device - at home, in cars, on sidewalks; the digital infosphere. Big Data so fine-tuned, no two voters hear the same proposition. You come home to a hologrammatic, AI-powered Donald Trump chatbot perched in your kitchen, asking personal questions - knowing everywhere you went, everything you searched, and how much you spent on lunch. We’re rushing toward this dystopia right now.

The pandemic took away many peoples' sense of security and freedom. Between the job lay-offs and confined living, it was only natural to question our tried and tested methods of obtaining financial security. To add to that, the pandemic infringed on our freedom of movement and because it was clear that the world would not be going back to normal anytime soon, it was essential to explore an alternative avenue to financial security and personal freedoms.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political.

These are the end times. We hear this sentiment in one way or another from various sources, from the fundamentalist preacher, to the scientist warning us of climate change. This is a time of economic uncertainty, political oppression, and cultural unraveling. Apocalypse, in the ancient world and today, is the experience of disconnection and of unraveling. It is when old gods are dying and the old stories no longer have meaning.