Social forecasting, future studies
Showing all 13 results
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A city on Mars
£10.99A city on Mars
Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away – no climate change, no war, no Twitter – beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of original research, and interviews with leading space scientists, engineers and legal experts, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space tech and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the deep knowledge needed to have space-kids, build space-farms and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, ‘A City on Mars’ investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create a nightmare, both for settlers and the people they leave behind.
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A liveable future is possible
£10.99A liveable future is possible
In this illuminating collection of interviews, Noam Chomsky shares his insights on the pressing challenges facing humanity. ‘A Liveable Future is Possible’ addresses artificial intelligence and the potential for such programs to surpass humans in cognitive awareness; what lies ahead for a world engulfed in a deadly climate crisis; the rise of neo-fascism internationally, and why we should organize across borders to confront it and the striking similarities between Trump and Biden’s foreign policies.
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Age of the city
£12.99Age of the city
Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist’s Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics and climate change must be faced. From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before. In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities.
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Brave new words
£25.00Brave new words
Whether we like it or not, the AI revolution is coming to education. In ‘Brave New Words’, Salman Khan, the visionary behind Khan Academy, explores how artificial intelligence and GPT technology will transform learning, offering a roadmap for teachers, parents, and students to navigate this exciting (and sometimes intimidating) new world. An insider in the world of education technology, Khan explains the ins and outs of these cutting-edge tools and how they will forever change the way we learn and teach. Rather than approaching the ChatGPT revolution with white-knuckled fear, Khan wants parents and teachers to embrace AI and adapt to it (while acknowledging its imperfections and limitations), so that every student can complement the work they’re already doing in profoundly new and creative ways, to personalize learning, adapt assessments, and support success in the classroom.
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Future vision
£12.99Future vision
Future Vision takes young readers on a beautifully illustrated and hopeful adventure into tomorrow’s world, exploring the technological and social developments that could await them.
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Great Britain?
£10.99Great Britain?
Things have not been going great for Britain. Wages are flatlining, taxes are rising and public services are collapsing. Our children can’t afford to buy a house and our neighbours are reliant on foodbanks. We are all yearning for a way out of the financial crises, generational wars and political dysfunction that dominate our lives. Most of all we want our – and Britain’s – future back. Torsten Bell offers both a clear-eyed diagnosis of the problems facing the country – a uniquely toxic combination of huge inequality and stagnant economic growth – and a hopeful, bold vision for an alternative.
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How to Create a Mind
£12.99How to Create a Mind
Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s leading AI researchers, innovators and futurists, offers a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilisation: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.
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On freedom
£25.00On freedom
Timothy Snyder has been called ‘the leading interpreter of our dark times’. As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge toward counsel and prediction, working against authoritarians. His book ‘On Tyranny’ has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom. Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means – and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
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The atomic human
£25.00The atomic human
Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displaces us from our position at the centre of the world. Neil D. Lawrence’s book shows why these fears may be misplaced. Atomism, proposed by Democritus, suggested it was impossible to continue dividing matter down into ever smaller components: eventually we reach a point where a cut cannot be made (the Greek for uncuttable is ‘atom’). In the same way, by slicing away at the facets of human intelligence that can be replaced by machines, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity. By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, the book reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded.
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The coming wave
£10.99The coming wave
We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will carry out complex tasks – operating businesses, producing unlimited digital content, running core government services and maintaining infrastructure. This will be a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability. We are not prepared. As cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies.
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The long history of the future
£18.99The long history of the future
We love to imagine the future. But why is dramatic future technology always just around the corner, and never a reality? For decades we’ve delighted in dreaming about a sci-fi utopia, from flying cars and bionic humans to hoverboards; with driverless cars first proposed at the 1939 World’s Fair. And why not? Building a better world, be it a free-flying commute or an automated urban lifestyle is a worthy dream. Given the pace of technological change, nothing seems impossible anymore. But why are these innovations always out of reach? Delving into the remarkable history of technology, ‘The Long History of the Future’ also looks at what lies ahead, showing how the origins of our technology may provide insight into how it realistically evolves.
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The Singularity Is Near
£18.99The Singularity Is Near
A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of How to Create a Mind and who Bill Gates calls ‘the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.’
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The skeptics’ guide to the future
£10.99The skeptics’ guide to the future
Our predictions of the future are a wild fantasy, inextricably linked to our present hopes and fears, biases and ignorance. Whether they be the outlandish leaps predicted in the 1920s, like multi-purpose utility belts with climate control capabilities and planes the size of luxury cruise ships, or the forecasts of the ’60s, which didn’t anticipate the sexual revolution or women’s liberation, the path to the present is littered with failed predictions and incorrect estimations. The best we can do is try to absorb from futurism’s checkered past, perhaps learning to do a little better. In ‘The Skeptics’ Guide To The Future,’ Steven Novella and his co-authors build upon the work of futurists of the past by examining what they got right, what they got wrong, and how they came to those conclusions.
£10.99