by Joel Garreau
Bloom, Howard. The Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000. ISBN: 0-471-29584-1.
Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. ISBN: 0-671-50969-1.
Haldane, J. B. S. Daedalus; or, Science and the Future. A paper given to the Heretics Society in Cambridge in 1923. First published in London in 1924 by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. Out of print, but transcribed text available. http://home.att.net/~p.caimi/Daedalus.PDF
A remarkably prescient and optimistic view.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Intelligent Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. ISBN: 0-262-11121-7.
———. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Viking, 1999. ISBN: 0-670-88217-8.
———. “Exponential Growth an Illusion?: Response to Ilkka Tuomi.” KurzweilAI.net, September 23, 2003. http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0593.html
———. The Web site of Kurzweil Technologies, his company: http://www.kurzweiltech.com
More, Sir Thomas. Utopia. First published in Latin in 1516. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997. ISBN: 0-486-29583-4.
Nisbet, Robert A. History of the Idea of Progress. New York: Basic Books, 1980. ASIN: 0-465-03025-4.
A work for the ages. Interesting companion reading to “History of the Idea of Decline,” cited below.
Postrel, Virginia. The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. New York: Free Press, 1999. ISBN: 0-684-86269-7.
Postrel argues that the great political divide is not between liberals and conservatives, but between “statists,” who seek to command and control change, and “dynamists,” who do not fear spontaneous evolution.
Rauch, Jonathan. “Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?” In The Atlantic Monthly, October 2003. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/10/rauch.htm
Richards, Jay W., ed. Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. The Critics of Strong AI. Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2002.
A debate between Kurzweil and some of his stronger opponents.
The Hell Scenario
Berry, Wendell. Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. New York: Counterpoint Press, 2001. ISBN: 1-582-43141-8.
A book that Bill Joy says has influenced him, by a poet, novelist and farmer who stubbornly insists there is more to reality than science can explain. “At the very end of Wendell Berry’s book ‘Life Is a Miracle,’” Joy says, “there is this wonderful passage where he talks about science and all these things we’re doing. These are not the world. I’m paraphrasing when he says something like—these are tools to make our habitation on earth more comfortable, but it’s not about them and we mistake them for the world. We mistake the goal of progress for life in the world.”
Bostrom, Nick. “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards.” In the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 9, March 9, 2002; first version: 2001. http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.pdf
Butler, Samuel. Erewhon; or, Over the Range. London: Trübner & Co., 1872; new and rev. ed., London: A.C. Fifield, 1913; Classic Publishers, 1923. ISBN: 1-582-01002-1.
Originally published privately by its New Zealand author, this is one of the first dystopian novels.
Crichton, Michael. Prey: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. ISBN: 0-066-21412-2.
A rip-snorting romp through a day-after-tomorrow future by the author of Jurassic Park. Guaranteed to scare the molecules out of you. Criticized for its inaccuracies, especially about nanotechnology, this fiction is nonetheless unusual in that the author in his introduction lays out the nonfiction technological underpinnings of his plot, only heightening the verisimilitude of his drama.
Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. ISBN: 0-374-23643-7.
The work that brought the idea of “posthumanism” into the mainstream. Fukuyama hates and fears its prospect. An exemplary and thought-provoking piece.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust I & II. (Goethe: The Collected Works, Vol. 2) Princeton: Princeton University Press, reprint edition, 1994. ISBN: 0-691-03656-X.
Greenfield, Susan. Tomorrow’s People: How 21st Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN: 0-713-99631-5.
Herman, Arthur. The Idea of Decline in Western History. New York: Free Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-684-82791-3.
A useful, if somewhat ideological, look at why Hell scenarios are so enduringly popular.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1932.
Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” In Wired, April 2000, 8.04. www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
Kaczynski, Theodore. The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future. Jolly Roger Press, 1995. ASIN: 0-963-42052-6.
He’s a homicidal maniac, but as a writer and analyst, he didn’t totally squander his Harvard education. Worth looking at.
Kass, Leon. Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs. New York: Free Press, 1985. ISBN: 0-029-18340-5.
———. “The Moral Meaning of Genetic Technology.” In Commentary, September, 1999. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Summaries/ Vi08I2P34-1.htm
———. “Preventing a Brave New World: Why We Should Ban Cloning Now.” In The New Republic, May 21, 2001. http://www.tnr.com/ 052101/kass052101_print.html
———. Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. The President’s Council on Bioethics. New York: ReganBooks, 2003. ISBN: 0-060-73490-6. http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/beyondtherapy
Not too many presidential commissions post on their Web sites a “bookshelf” of recommended readings on fate, suffering and dignity, with literate introductions to selected writings by Ovid, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Swift and Tolstoy. But then, not too many presidential commissions are run by Leon Kass, the conservative moral philosopher. It’s a fascinating experiment Kass is running in his President’s Council on Bioethics. He is trying to formulate White House policy on things like stem cells, basing doctrine not only on ideas of morality but, more specifically, on eighteenth-century concepts like “natural law,” illustrating it with literary antecedents. This is very Jeffersonian. You have to give the program points for style, even if you agree with opponents who believe this endeavor is going to destroy America’s economy by giving away its high-tech edge to Asian researchers. Highly readable and thought-provoking.
Kurzweil, Ray. “Promise and Peril of the 21st Century.” In CIO magazine, Fall/Winter 2003. http://www.cio.com/archive/092203/kurzweil.html
A thoughtful and useful response to McKibben and Joy’s Hell scenarios.
Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, Touchstone edition, 1996. ISBN: 0-805-42047-9.
Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991. ISBN: 0-871-56739-3.
McKibben, Bill. Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2003. ISBN: 0-805-07096-6.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. Plume Books, Centennial edition, 2003, with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon. ISBN: 0-452-28423-6.
Posner, Richard A. Catastrophe: Risk and Response. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0195178130.
Rees, Martin. Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century on Earth and Beyond. New York: Basic Books, 2003. ISBN: 0-465-06862-6. Published in Britain as Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity’s Survival. London: Heinemann, 2003.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World. New York
: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998. ISBN: 0-874-77909-X.
Russell, Bertrand. Icarus, or, The Future of Science. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1924. The text can be found at http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Icarus.html
A response to Haldane’s Daedalus lecture, cited above.
Seal, Cheryl. “Frankensteins in the Pentagon: DARPA’s Creepy Bioengineering Program: DARPA Bioengineering Program Seeks to Turn Soldiers Into Cyborgs.” In The News Insider, August 25, 2003. http://www.newsinsider.org/
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. London: Lockington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818. St. Martin’s Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-312-12461-9.
The Prevail Scenario
Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. New York: Viking, 1994. ISBN: 0-670-83515-3.
———. The Clock of the Long Now, Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer. New York: Basic Books, 1999. ISBN: 0-465-04512-X.
Brand has written two books about managing change in complex systems, including human management of The Curve. How Buildings Learn proposes that any physical structure is composed of layers which change at different speeds, thus creating shear forces that, if they are bonded too tightly, ultimately tear the structure apart. If they’re designed to slip past each other, however, the fast parts adaptively handle innovation and shocks, while the slow parts integrate everything into a long-term working whole. The analogy is to the way geological plates, slipping and sliding past each other, produce earthquakes. The layers, from fast to slow, include the furnishings, the layout of the interior, the mechanical systems, the exterior, the structure that holds the load, and the site itself. See page 13 of How Buildings Learn for the quick version of this idea, and the rest of the book for its elaboration. Brand then expanded the idea to civilization as a whole in The Clock of the Long Now. There the health of civilization depends on encouraging respect and slippage between its layers, which include fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture and nature. Understanding and managing the shear forces between them thus become crucial and central issues in managing The Curve.
Brin, David. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? New York: Perseus Books, 1998. ISBN: 0-738-20144-8.
Brockman, John, ed. The New Humanists. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2003. ISBN: 0-760-74529-3.
Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. ISBN: 0-875-84762-5.
A remarkable work examining the proposition that information does not exist abstractly as zeroes and ones. It is embedded in, and dependent on, culture and values.
Butterflies and Wheels. “Butterfliesandwheels.com: Fighting Fashionable Nonsense.” http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/about.htm
From its statement of purpose: “There are two motivations for setting up the Web site. The first is the common one having to do with the thought that truth is important, and that to tell the truth about the world it is necessary to put aside whatever preconceptions (ideological, political, moral, etc.) one brings to the endeavour. The second has to do with the tendency of the political Left (which both editors of this site consider themselves to be part of) to subjugate the rational assessment of truth-claims to the demands of a variety of pre-existing political and moral frameworks. We believe this tendency to be a mistake on practical as well as epistemological and ethical grounds.”
Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections: Integrating the Biological, Cognitive, and Social Dimensions of Life into a Science of Sustainability. New York: Doubleday, 2002. ISBN: 0-385-49471-8.
———. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975. ISBN: 0-877-73077-6.
———. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor, 1996. ISBN: 0-385-47675-2.
An Indian physicist with enormous guts attempts to link the mystic philosophical traditions of the East to the rationalist scientific traditions of the West.
Carse, James P. Finite and Infinite Games. New York: Free Press, 1986. ISBN: 0-029-05980-1.
Hampden-Turner, Charles, and Fons Trompenaars. Mastering the Infinite Game: How East Asian Values Are Transforming Business Practices. Oxford: Capstone, 1997. ISBN: 1-900-96108-3.
Lanier, Jaron. “One Half a Manifesto.” In Edge, September 2000. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html
A highly readable and intriguing document by the advocate of The Prevail Scenario presented in this book, outlining some of the underpinnings of his thinking.
———. “A Future That Loves Us: An Optimistic One Thousand Year Scenario.” Presented at Global Business Network, June 15, 2004. http://www.advanced.org/jaron/lovely/default.htm
An elaboration of his thinking regarding The Prevail Scenario.
Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House, 2001. ISBN: 0-375-50578-4.
A Stanford law professor makes a strong case that we must resist the efforts of media and software industries to shut off access to publicly held material, which Lessig sees as a kind of intellectual commons. He persuasively decries any lopsided control of ideas and suggests practical solutions that consider the rights of both creators and consumers, while acknowledging the serious impact of new technologies on old ways of doing business.
Ogilvy, Jay. Creating Better Futures: Scenario Planning as a Tool for a Better Tomorrow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-195-14611-5.
This work by one of the pioneers of scenario planning is unusual in that it discusses how you might achieve the future you desire.
Pacotti, Sheldon. “Are we doomed yet?: the computer-networked, digital world poses enormous threats to humanity that no government, no matter how totalitarian, can stop. A fully open society is our best chance for survival.” In Salon.com, March 31, 2003. http://salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/31/knowledge/print.html
A thoughtful and nuanced argument for spreading knowledge as widely as possible, even in the face of unimaginable new threats.
Singer, Peter. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. ISBN: 0-374-23496-5.
———. Animal Liberation. New York: New York Review Books, 1990. ISBN: 0-940-32200-5.
———, and Paola Cavalieri. The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-312-10473-1.
———, and Helga Kuhse, eds. Bioethics: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. ISBN: 0-631-20310-9.
A massively controversial philosopher, seen in some quarters as testing the limits of freedom of speech, examines the implications of expanding our circle of empathy.
Smith, Merritt Roe, and Leo Marx, eds. Does Technology Drive History? Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-262-19347-7.
Leo Marx is one of my heroes, but I wish this book answered the title’s question better.
Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Knopf, 1996. ISBN: 0-679-42563-2.
———. Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity. New York: Knopf, 2003. ISBN: 0-375-40722-7. Vintage, 2004. ISBN: 0-375-70707-7.
We shape our machines, and then they shape us.
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. ISBN: 0-142-43717-4.
The transcendent cussedness that may see us through.
On Human Nature
Barrow, John D., and Frank J. Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN: 0-198-51949-4.
Five centuries after Copernicus, this collection of ideas puts human nature back front and center in creation, holding that the existence of intelligent observers determines the fundamental structure of the universe.
Bidney, David. “Human Nature and the Cultu
ral Process.” In American Anthropologist, July-September 1947, 49(3):375–399.
Brown, Donald E. Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991. ISBN: 0-070-08209-X.
The modern evidence that such a thing as human nature exists.
Calvin, William H. A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
———. A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
———. Web site: www.WilliamCalvin.com
From the theoretical neurophysiologist who is my favorite because of his relentless quest for meaning.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon, 1949.
———, with Bill Moyers, Betty Sue Flowers, ed. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988. ISBN: 0-385-24773-7.
Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York, Scribner, 1994. ISBN: 0-684-19431-7.
We don’t need no stinking soul. Crick is the Nobel Prize–winning codiscoverer, with James Watson, of the double-helix structure of DNA.