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Futures - Books

Brave New World
Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 while he was living in Italy (he moved to Amber Rock, California in 1937). By this time, Huxley had already established himself as a writer and social satirist. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, had published a collection of his poetry (The Burning Wheel, 1916) and four successful satirical novels: Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928). Brave New World was Huxley's fifth novel and first dystopian work.

Critical Path
Critical Path is a book written by US author and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller with the assistance of Kiyoshi Kuromiya. First published in 1981, it is alongside Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth one of Fuller's best-known works. Vast in its scope, it describes Fuller's own vision of the development of human civilization, economic history, and his highly original economic ideology based, amongst other things, on his detailed description of why scarcity of resources need no longer be a decisive factor in global politics.

Engines of Creation
The book features nanotechnology, which Richard Feynman had discussed in his 1959 speech There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Drexler imagines a world where the entire Library of Congress can fit on a chip the size of a sugar cube and where universal assemblers, tiny machines that can build objects atom by atom, will be used for everything from medicinal robots that help clear capillaries to environmental scrubbers that clear pollutants from the air. In the book, Drexler first proposes the gray goo scenario—his prediction of what might happen if molecular nanotechnology were used to build uncontrollable self-replicating machines.

Future Shock
Future Shock is a book written by the sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term "future shock" as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time". The book, which became an international bestseller, grew out of an article "The Future as a Way of Life" in Horizon magazine, Summer 1965 issue.[1][2][3][4] The book has sold over 6 million copies and has been widely translated.

Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century is the third book in a trilogy written by the futurist Alvin Toffler, following on from Future Shock and The Third Wave.

Revolutionary Wealth
Revolutionary Wealth is a book written by social analysts Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi Toffler, first published in 2006 by Knopf (ISBN 0-375-40174-1). It is a continuation of the 1980 The Third Wave, which itself is a sequel to Future Shock. Revolutionary Wealth significantly expands on the Third Wave. As in the older volume, the book argues that institutions—public, private, and social—left over from an era of mass production are unsuited to a new civilization being built throughout the world. Only now, further detail is provided on what will constitute the Third Wave society

The Age of Intelligent Machines
The Age Of Intelligent Machines is the title of an artificial intelligence documentary (1987) and book (1990) by futurist Ray Kurzweil; this was his first book and it won the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990 award by the Association of American Publishers. Many guest "A.I. experts" were featured.

The Age of Spiritual Machines
The Age of Spiritual Machines is a book by futurist Ray Kurzweil about the future course of humanity, particularly relating to the development of artificial intelligence and its impact on human consciousness. It is also a study on the concept of technological singularity.

The Improving State of the World
The average person has never been better fed than today. Between 1961 and 2002, the world average daily food supply per person increased by 24% (38% in developing nations). Chronic undernourishment in developing nations declined from 37 to 17 percent of their population between 1969-71 and 2000-02. Greater agricultural productivity and international trade has caused inflation-adjusted prices of food commodities to decline by 75 percent since 1950. Access to safe water and sanitation has increased.

The Keys to the White House
The Keys are based on the theory that that presidential election results turn primarily on the performance of the party controlling the White House and that campaigning by challenging or incumbent-party candidates will have no impact on results. According to this theory, a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president based on the performance of the party holding the White House as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term - economic boom and bust, foreign policy successes and failures, social unrest, scandal, and policy innovation.

The Limits to Growth
The Limits to Growth is a 1972 book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, commissioned by the Club of Rome. Its authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The book used the World3 model to simulate[1] the consequence of interactions between the Earth's and human systems. The book echoes some of the concerns and predictions of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population

The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps
The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T. Savage is a book (published in 1992 and reprinted in 1994 with an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke) in the field of Exploratory engineering that gives a series of concrete stages the author believes will lead to interstellar colonization. Many specific scientific and engineering details are presented, as are numerous issues involved in Space colonization.

The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century
The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century is a 2002 collection of essays by twenty-five well-known scientists, edited by Edge Foundation founder John Brockman, who wrote the introduction. The essays contain speculation by the authors about the scientific and technological advances that are likely to occur in their various fields in the first half of the 21st century. The collection is divided into two parts; the twelve essays in Part One are devoted to more theoretical speculation, whereas the thirteen essays in Part Two discuss the possible practical applications of scientific and technological advance.

The Population Bomb
The Population Bomb was a best-selling book written by Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968.[1] It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" were widespread in the 1950s and 60s, but the book and its charismatic author brought the idea to an even wider audience.[2][3] The book has been criticized in recent decades for its alarmist tone and inaccurate predictions. The Ehrlichs stand by the basic ideas in the book, stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future" and believe that it achieved their goals because "it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future

The Singularity Is Near
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is a 2005 update of Raymond Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines and his 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines. In it, as in the two previous versions, Kurzweil attempts to give a glimpse of what awaits us in the near future. He proposes a coming technological singularity, and how we would thus be able to augment our bodies and minds with technology. He describes the singularity as resulting from a combination of three important technologies of the 21st century: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (including artificial intelligence).

The Third Wave (book)
The Third Wave is a book published in 1980 by Alvin Toffler. It is the sequel to Future Shock, published in 1970, and the second in what was originally just a trilogy that was continued with Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century in 1990. A new addition Revolutionary Wealth was published, however, in 2006 and may be considered as a major expansion of The Third Wave.

The Transparent Society
The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy. The work first appeared as a magazine article by Brin in Wired in late 1996.[1] In 2008, security expert Bruce Schneier called the transparent society concept a "myth"[2] (a characterization Brin later rebutted[3]), claiming it ignores wide differences in the relative power of those who access information.[2]

The World Without Us
The World Without Us is a non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared, written by American journalist Alan Weisman and published by St. Martin's Thomas Dunne Books.[1] It is a book-length expansion of Weisman's own February 2005 Discover article "Earth Without People".[2] Written largely as a thought experiment, it outlines, for example, how cities and houses would deteriorate, how long man-made artifacts would last, and how remaining lifeforms would evolve. Weisman concludes that residential neighborhoods would become forests within 500 years, and that radioactive waste, bronze statues, plastics, and Mount Rushmore would be among the longest lasting evidence of human presence on Earth.

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