A Brief History of Tomorrow
How The Experts Usually Screw Up (Future Forecasting)
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating look at the future, as you've never seen it.
Ten years from now, will we have a tiny personal computer surgically inserted in an earlobe, capable of connecting to phone lines and the internet? Fifty years from now, will atomic-sized robots replace surgeons? A hundred years from now, instead of taking the bus, will we simply teleport to work? It all may sound like impossible science fiction, but not too long ago, so did walking on the moon. Journalist Jonathan Margolis interviews leading thinkers in such fields as genetics, medicine, neurobiology, quantum physics, robotics, computer science, and space travel to explore where we're going, and what it will look like when - and if - we get there.
Beginning with famously flawed past visions of the future - among them H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates - Margolis examines many of the strange and tempting futures that may lie in store for us. Politics, society, religion, and work are all destined for great changes. What might they be? How will they come about? Thought-provoking, amusing, and absolutely original, A Brief History of Tomorrow is a deliciously compelling look at something we all spend a lot of time contemplating: the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a voice pitched somewhere between conversational, conspiratorial and professorial, Margolis takes on "the arrogance of the present"Deach generation's view that it is on the cusp of greatness and that the things which are important now will always beDbut simultaneously argues that ours is indeed a remarkable time. The author of Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic and columnist for the Financial Times shows just how remarkably wrong or astonishingly right predictions can be. The fascinatingly odd visions covered in chapters on the mind, leisure, the human body and more will make readers wonder if current commonly accepted predictionsDsuch as global warming are all that much less bizarre. Readers will be so effectively drawn in that they will be able to see the subtle ways that the future is already upon us (smart-lawn mowers, cell phones) and ways in which we have fallen behind our own imaginations (space travel, farming the sea). This is a clever look at how the world could have been, how it might be and how it won't be.
