Amazon | Why has median income stopped rising in the US? Why is the share of population that is working falling so rapidly? Why are our economy and society are becoming more unequal?
A popular explanation right now is that the root cause underlying these symptoms is technological stagnation — a slowdown in the kinds of ideas and inventions that bring progress and prosperity.
In Race Against the… read more
K. Eric Drexler is known as the founding father of nanotechnology—the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and… read more
Washington Post reporter Garreau takes readers on a cross-country trip into the future as he interviews scientists and other thinkers grappling with the implications of our newfound—and, to some, frightening—knowledge of the genome. Highlighting what he calls “the Curve”—the rate of exponential change in technology—Garreau (Edge City: Life on the New Frontier) breaks the central part of his book into four scenarios. In “Heaven,” genetic engineering will… read more
Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Glass half-full or half-empty? Do you look on the bright side or turn towards the dark? These are easy questions for most of us to answer, because our personality types are hard-wired into our brains.
As pioneering psychologist and neuroscientist Elaine Fox has discovered, our outlook on life reflects our primal inclination to seek pleasure or avoid danger — inclinations that, in many… read more
Young Wade Watts takes refuge in the OASIS, the “globally networked virtual reality” that nearly all of humanity relies on. It’s 2044, the year before the Singularity futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts will inextricably unite humans and computers. … — Booklist Review
At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part… read more
Amazon | More than 174 million Americans are gamers, and the average young person in the United States will spend ten thousand hours gaming by the age of twenty-one. According to world-renowned game designer Jane McGonigal, the reason for this mass exodus to virtual worlds is that videogames are increasingly fulfilling genuine human needs. In this groundbreaking exploration of the power and future of gaming, McGonigal reveals… read more
Amazon | Neal Stephenson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Anathem, returns to the terrain of his groundbreaking novels Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon to deliver a high-intensity, high-stakes, action-packed adventure thriller in which a tech entrepreneur gets caught in the very real crossfire of his own online war game.
In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British… read more
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | A groundbreaking work, Redesigning Humans tackles the controversial subject of engineering the human germline — the process of permanently altering the genetic code of an individual so that the changes are passed on to the offspring. Gregory Stock, an expert on the implications of recent advances in reproductive biology, has glimpsed the inevitable future of biomedical engineering.
Within decades, Stock asserts, technological advances will bring… read more
Nathan Myhrvold, Founder and CEO, Intellectual Ventures:
“A delightfully opinionated, visionary and controversial romp through synthetic biology, which is one of the most important technologies of our time.”
Eric Topol, Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Research Institute, and author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine:
“Literally reinventing nature could provide solutions to intractable problems with the energy supply, global warming, and human health. In Regenesis, George… read more
Amazon | In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first… read more
Amazon | Fifteen years after his #1 New York Times bestseller, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, Deepak Chopra revisits “the forgotten miracle” — the body’s infinite capacity for change and renewal. You cannot take advantage of this miracle, Chopra says, unless you are willing to completely reinvent your body, transforming it from a material object to a dynamic, flowing process. “Your physical body is a fiction,” Chopra contends. Every cell is… read more
RETURN TO THE GARDEN is the first novel in a series called “The Eleanor Chronicles” that Norie Huddle is writing to introduce almost 45 years of her research and thinking about practical ways to transform human civilization so that we may survive and thrive.
Luis Alvarez, a young Ecuadorian man, meets an older North American woman named simply “Eleanor” on a long bus ride in Ecuador. They have a… read more
Futurists have touted the 21st century as the century of biology primarily due to the potential of genomics. That potential is based on anticipated revolutions. These revolutions present themselves in many fashions. Revolutions: Paving the Way for the Bioeconomy is an in-depth look at these revolutions.
Industrial Revolutions
Genomics researchers hope to launch personalized medicine and cure diseases by identifying drug targets and create novel therapies such as… read more
Amazon | Not long ago, it was thought that the brain you were born with was the brain you would die with, and that the brain cells you had at birth were the most you would ever possess. Your brain was thought to be “hardwired” to function in predetermined ways. It turns out that’s not true. Your brain is not hardwired, it’s “softwired” by experience. This book shows… read more
A rousing call to action for those who would be citizens of the world—online and off.
We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online grows, it inevitably leads to a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. We’ll understand more, we think. We’ll know more. We’ll engage… read more
