What will planet Earth be like in twenty years? At mid-century? In the year 2100? Prescient and convincing, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future. Never has the world offered more promise for the future and been more fraught with dangers. Attali anticipates an unraveling of American hegemony as transnational corporations sever the ties linking free enterprise to democracy. World tensions will be primed for horrific warfare for resources and dominance. The ultimate question is: Will we leave our children and grandchildren a world that is not only viable but better, or in this nuclear world bequeath to them a planet that will be a living hell? Either way, he warns, the time to act is now.
The Internet is the most remarkable thing human beings have built since the Pyramids. John Naughton's book intersperses wonderful personal stories with an authoritative account of where the Net actually came from, who invented it and why and where it might be taking us. Most of us have no idea how the Internet works, or who created it. Even fewer have any idea what it means for society and the future. In a cynical age, John Naughton has not lost his capacity for wonder. He examines the nature of his own enthusiasm for technology and traces its roots in his lonely childhood and in his relationship with his father. A Brief History of the Future is an intensely personal celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination and, above all, of the power of ideas, passionately felt, to change the world.
What if, instead of trying to predict the future, we could just pick the one we want - and then invent it? Well, we can. Think of the wealth of technological resources already available to us. The computing power in that smartphone in your pocket could have guided 120 million Apollo-era spacecrafts to the moon and back. A gigabyte of memory cost $300,000 in the 1980s - today, it costs a fraction of a penny. Now, try to imagine 2050, when your computing devices will be a million times more powerful or available at one-millionth of today's prices.In this deeply researched and compelling book, the authors do the imagining for you, describing seven so-incredible-as-to-be-almost-magical capabilities that will be available by 2050 in computing, communication, information, genomics, energy, water, and transportation. You may finally get that flying car, have ample water even in a desert, and be treated for disease through microscopic robots in your bloodstream.Drawing on their decades of experience helping major organizations formulate strategies for innovation, the authors demonstrate how to use combinations of those seven capabilities to imagine "perfect" futures, whether that means reversing climate change, resolving today's disinformation crisis, or living 20 years longer. This book paints visions of how the world could - and should - look as we pass the planet on to future generations.We can use those visions to start inventing a perfect future - today.
David Manning wrote A Brief History of the Recent Future in the mid 1970s with the idea of satirizing the present by forecasting the most bizarre imaginable future. The result was a verbally animated cartoon tracing the evolution of an apocalyptic conflict between proponents of ganic garbage vs those advocating ficial garbage as civilization's final energy resource. Along the way, the tale introduces such absurdities as a credit-system economy; the Bronx Sanitation Air Force; a 3,000-acre rubber-raft island named Carabia; a news toaster that burns headlines onto breakfast bread; and people metabolically transformed by Mango Tango, the core building block of the artificial ecosystem. Resurrected from the past, the book remains, after 35-plus years, a satiric fantasy, now looking back at the odd events nobody knows transpired but brought us to our increasingly dystopian state. Once the harbinger of a future too ridiculous to contemplate, the original bizarre predictions resonate more every day.
The Future Tense of Teaching in the Digital Age The digital environment has radically changed how and what students need and want to learn, but have we radically changed how we deliver education? Are educators shifting and adapting or stuck in the traditional That’s the Way We’ve Always Done It world? In this book, educators will be challenged to take action and adapt to a split-screen classroom--thinking and acting to accommodate today’s learners versus allowing traditional practices by default. Written with a touch of humor and a choose-your-own-adventure approach, the authors built chapters to be skimmed, scoured or searched for interesting, relevant or required material. Readers will be able to jump in where it serves them best. Consider predictions about what learning will look like in the future. Understand and learn to leverage nine core learning attributes of digital generations. Discover ten critical roles educators can embrace to remain relevant in the digital age. Keep things simple, concentrate on how learners learn, and change your approach from present to future tense.
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Narrated by a far-future historian, Peter Jensen leaves an account of the world from the 1990s to the opening of the 23rd century as a gift to his granddaughter. A combination of fiction and scholarship, this third edition of Wagar's speculative history of the future alternates between descriptions of world events and intimate glimpses of this historian's family into the first centuries of the new millennium.
'If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.' John Galsworthy Predicting the future is a notoriously precarious, profitable and even dangerous business. This book takes a look at the most interesting, important and influential futurists over the years; from Delphi's virgin visionaries, to pop futurists, science fiction writers, trend gurus and evolutionary experts. It provides a chronological history of the future, looking at the predictions that have shaped our world - Leonardo's flying machines; Darwin's evolutionary theory; Mendeleyev's periodic table; Marx's political futurism; Orwell's Big Brother; von Neumann's game theory that nearly led to World War Three; Buckminster Fuller and Corbusier's visions of social change through architecture. Prediction has become an integral part of business - Shell used scenario planning against oil shocks in the seventies, Nokia has a 'foresight' department, even the government of Lichtenstein has a shiny new futures department. But how do these people think, where do they get their ideas and what influence do they really have over our minds, businesses and politics?As well as the history of this influential, mysterious discipline this book also gives an insider's view of the workings of future prediction today. Ultimately, we must ask whether we can 'make' the future, or does the future make us?
What if teleportation was really possible? Englishman Richie Fisher is about to find out ... Richie and his wife Clara have won a weekend in New York in a newspaper competition. While Clara is off blowing their spending money, Richie wanders aimlessly, chewing on a veggie-burger, ending up in a gift-shop where he finds himself standing in front of an instant transporter machine. It looks nothing like the open-plan teleporter on Captain Kirk's Starship Enterprise; in fact, it seems more like a glorified microwave oven. Richie places his burger inside, hits the return key on the linked-up computer - and the burger disappears. But if he can teleport a half-eaten veggie-burger, what else could you do with the machine? For criminals, the possibilities are endless. Who could catch you if you beamed drugs into nostrils a hundred miles away? And how much would illegal immigrants pay to be teleported into the rich host country of their choice? Richie buys a teleporter and takes it back to England, where the chaos begins ...
Awards: One Book South Dakota Common Read, South Dakota Humanities Council, 2022. PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, PEN America, 2020. One Book One Tribe Book Award, First Nations Development Institute, 2020. Finalist, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, 2019. Shortlist, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, 2019. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto. Now available in paperback on the fifth anniversary of its original publication, Our History Is the Future features a new afterword by Nick Estes about the rising indigenous campaigns to protect our environment from extractive industries and to shape new ways of relating to one another and the world. In this award-winning book, Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the present campaigns against fossil fuel pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan “Mni Wiconi”—Water Is Life—was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even with the encampment gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue. While a historian by trade, Estes draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires) and his own family’s rich history of struggle.
