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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 dramatic, larger-than-life true story behind the founding of Oculus and its quest for virtual reality, by the bestselling author of Console Wars. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with the key players driving this revolution, The History of the Future weaves together a rich, cinematic narrative that captures the breakthroughs, breakdowns and human drama of trying to change the world. The result is a super accessible and supremely entertaining look at the birth of a game-changing new industry. From iconic books like Neuromancer to blockbuster films like The Matrix, virtual reality has long been hailed as the ultimate technology. But outside of a few research labs and military training facilities, this tantalizing vision of the future was nothing but science fiction. Until 2012, when Oculus founder Palmer Luckey—then just a rebellious teenage dreamer living alone in a camper trailer—invents a device that has the potential to change everything. With the help of a videogame legend, a serial entrepreneur and many other colorful characters, Luckey’s scrappy startup kickstarts a revolution and sets out to bring VR to the masses. As with most underdog stories, things don’t quite go according to plan. But what happens next turns out to be the ultimate entrepreneurial journey: a tale of battles won and lost, lessons learned and neverending twists and turns—including an unlikely multi-billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, which shakes up the landscape in Silicon Valley and gives Oculus the chance to forever change our reality. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with the key players driving this revolution, The History of the Future weaves together a rich, cinematic narrative that captures the breakthroughs, breakdowns and human drama of trying to change the world. The result is a super accessible and supremely entertaining look at the birth of a game-changing new industry.
A collection of long essays centered on American places where the past is erupting into the present in unexpected ways.
Perhaps the most important histiographic innovation of the twentieth century was the application of the historical method to wider and more expansive areas of the past. Where historians once defined the study of history strictly in terms of politics and the actions and decisions of Great Men, historians today are just as likely to inquire into a much wider domain of the past, from the lives of families and peasants, to more abstract realms such as the history of mentalities and emotions. Historians have applied their method to a wider variety of subjects; regardless of the topic, historians ask questions, seek evidence, draw inferences from that evidence, create representations, and subject these representations to the scrutiny of other historians. This book severs the historical method from the past altogether by applying that method to a domain outside of the past. The goal of this book is to apply history-as-method to the study of the future, a subject matter domain that most historians have traditionally and vigorously avoided. Historians have traditionally rejected the idea that we can use the study of history to think about the future. The book reexamines this long held belief, and argues that the historical method is an excellent way to think about and represent the future. At the same time, the book asserts that futurists should not view the future as a scientist might--aiming for predictions and certainties--but rather should view the future in the same way that an historian views the past.
A wide-ranging survey of predictions about the future development and impact of science and technology through the twentieth century.
Imagining the history of the twenty-first century through its artifacts, from silent messaging systems to artificial worlds on asteroids. In the year 2082, a curator looks back at the twenty-first century, offering a history of the era through a series of objects and artifacts. He reminisces about the power of connectivity, which was reinforced by such technologies as silent messaging—wearable computers that relay subvocal communication; recalls the Fourth Great Awakening, when a regimen of pills could make someone virtuous; and notes disapprovingly the use of locked interrogation, which delivers “enhanced interrogation” simulations via virtual reality. The unnamed curator quotes from a self-help guide to making friends with “posthumans,” describes the establishment of artificial worlds on asteroids, and recounts pro-democracy movements in epistocratic states. In A New History of the Future in 100 Objects, Adrian Hon constructs a possible future by imagining the things it might leave in its wake. Many of these things are just an update or two away: improved ankle monitors, for example, and deliverbots. Others may be the logical conclusions of current trends—“downvote” networks that identify and erase undesirables, and Glyphish, an emoticon-based language that supersedes the written word. More benign are Braid Collective, which provides financial support for artists, and Rechartered Cities, which invites immigrants to revitalize urban areas hollowed out by changing demographics. With this engaging and ingenious work, Hon leads the way into an imagined future while offering readers a new perspective on the present.
London. The year 2078. Like all other major cities, London is a silent wasteland, abandoned and crumbling, populated only by the renegade ‘Offliner’ movement, the lawless ‘Seekers’ and other minorities that rejected The Upload in 2060. As a result, these rebels live off the grid and in abject poverty, taking shelter in makeshift shantytowns and hideouts. The Offliners have made the disused Piccadilly Circus Tube station their home: a fully self-sufficient, subterranean community of about 500 people, known as the ‘Cell’. In 2060, following a series of deadly pandemics, devastating environmental disasters and a violent surge in cyber terrorism, the UN made it compulsory for every tax paying citizen in all of its 193 united nations to login to the Perspecta Universe: a virtual reality universe provided by the tech giant Gnosys Inc. So began a period of history known as The Upload. Totally safe, pollution free, environmentally friendly: what was an alternative reality at first has become the only reality. Now, in 2078, billions of people all around the world exist in dedicated Hab-Belts – massive dormitory complexes surrounding the major cities – unconscious of the world around them: living, working, loving, learning, inside the Perspecta Universe. KID – A History of The Future follows Josh ‘Kid’ Jones, a young Offliner who discovers that an antiquated piece of technology called an ‘iPhone’, left to him by his father, seemingly allows him to communicate with the past through social media. He strikes up a friendship with Isabel Parry, a 16 year old in 2021, and the two begin communicating through time and space via Instagram. In doing so they are not only changing their own fate, but also the fate of the rest of the world.
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.
Reflects upon the discipline of history, claiming that the writing and teaching of history in higher education is in decline, and explores ways in which the future of the discipline can thrive.
Over the past century, our species has made unprecedented technological innovations with which we have sought to control nature. In A Natural History of the Future, biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life's overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life's future flourishing is not in question. Ours is. A Natural History of the Future sets a new standard for understanding the diversity and destiny of life itself.