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AN Optimist's Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer "What's Next?", by Mark Stevenson
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In the tradition of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a smart and entertaining guide to the future.
Mark Stevenson-a writer, deep thinker, and stand-up comedian-set out simply, asking, "What's next for our species?" and then traveled the globe in pursuit of the answers. Along the way, he visited the Australian outback to visit the farmers who can save us from climate change, met a robot with mood swings, and talked to the Spaniard who's putting a hotel in space. While some might be overwhelmed, or even dismayed by the looming realities of genome sequencing, synthetic biology, a nuclear renaissance, and carbon scrubbing, Stevenson remains, well, optimistic. Drawing on his singular humor and storytelling to break down these sometimes complicated discoveries, An Optimist's Tour of the Future paints a wonderfully readable, and completely enthralling portrait of where we'll be when we grow up- and why it's not so scary.
- Sales Rank: #748156 in Books
- Published on: 2012-02-07
- Released on: 2012-02-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.26" h x .99" w x 5.51" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Review
"Stevenson describes our future's possibilities with a journalist's eye for detail, a teacher's knack for translating complexities, and a comic's wry commentary." — Christian Science Monitor
"A series of sharp and fascinating interviews with technological innovators and scientific visionaries." — Wall Street Journal
"Stevenson surveys a huge number of research fields - synthetic biology, nanotech, robotics and alternative energy to name just a few - in labs on nearly every continent, and weaves the most promising aspects of each into one grand vision. ... The book is a refreshing reminder that the future will always belong to the optimists." — The New Scientist
"Stevenson does a great job of delivering all the facts with a sense of wonder and curiosity... I highly recommend this book." — Wired's Geek Dad
"From longevity science to robotics to cancer research, Stevenson explores the most cutting-edge ideas in science and technology from around the world, the important ethical and philosophical questions they raise, and, perhaps most importantly, the incredible potential for innovation through the cross-pollination of these different ideas and disciplines." — The Atlantic
About the Author
Mark Stevenson is codirector of Flow Associates, Britain's most respected cultural learning consultancy, and ReAgency, a leading organization that promotes science communication. He lives in London.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Insightful look into the future, with well-founded, reasoned optimism
By Christopher J Hughey
Think back over the past few years and think about the books you've read on the current state of the world and/or its fast-approaching fate. Then, when you get back from the pharmacy and take your copious amounts of anti-depressants needed to cope with those books, pick up a copy of An Optimist's Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer "What's Next?" and throw out the pills. Amid all the doom and gloom, here's a blossom of hope. Mind you, Mr. Stevenson is no naïf in rose-colored glasses: he approaches his subjects - among them some of the world's most brilliant people - with an intelligent skepticism, challenges their assumptions and never lets them off the hook when they try to wiggle around the tough questions.
To get a sense of Stevenson's style and approach in this book, think about the motivations behind What Are You Optimistic About?: Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better, combine it with the probing intelligence and never-say-die quest for creative answers behind Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.), then dash in the wit and wisdom of a A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Each section of Stevenson's book covers a specific topic, with subjects ranging from transhumanism to robotics to the environment to genetic engineering (to name but a few). But more interesting still are the people working at the cutting edge of these fields. In each section, we follow Mr. Stevenson around the world as he visits some of these leading minds of our time, visionaries like Ray Kurzweil, George Church and Vint Cerf. Through wit, charm and intelligence, he elicits a level of frankness that you will not witness in any other interview format. (In that sense, the book is worth the price for the biographical components alone.)
I think the biggest selling point of this book, though, is the way it alters the reader's whole way of looking at an exciting future that is so much closer than most of us might think. Stevenson calls it a 'reboot', and that's a very apt descriptor: the reader finishes the book with a sense of awe (and yes, some trepidation) about a future in which everything we have taken for granted for so long, is suddenly washed away in favor of very new definitions of things as fundamental as success, happiness, relationships, even mortality.
So put down the doom and gloom for a while, turn off the 24/7 parade of dismay and pick up this reason to be optimistic. The future is going to be a wild ride, and Stevenson's book is a good road map.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Informative, easy to read and fun!
By Steve T
I really enjoyed this book!! It is very readable and offers a very informative look at some of the most important future technologies. It's based on the author's travels and interviews with the top people in the various fields. I find it interesting and surprising that a professional comedian would write such an insightful book on these subjects.
The book looks at genetics/biotech engineering, robotics and artificial intelligence, transhumanism (merging people and machines), nanotechnology, the commercial space program and technology to battle climate change. The last part of the book focuses on how all this might affect people, society and culture. As the title suggests the book has a generally optimistic take on these technologies, but it does offer some balance, and the author keeps up his sense of humor (British humor) even when writing about existential treats from things like engineered viruses or nanotechnology grey goo.
Highly recommended for anyone who wants to get an idea of what might be coming in the next few decades. If you really want to delve into the technology and especially transhumanism there is also Ray Kurzweil's (who was interviewed in this book) classic, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (but that is a much more challenging and technical read that this book).
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A peak at tomorrow today!
By Steve Reina
What will the future bring?
Science writer Mark Stevenson answers this question in four sections dealing with research related to:
1) Extending the human life span;
2) Creating more human machines;
3) Protecting Mother Earth; and
4) The author's specualtions on where all these developments will leave us.
In some cases, the "optimist" in this book's title is merely given lip service. In other cases, "optimist" means giving credence to some research possibilities that may take a long time to yield any fruit (if, honestly ever).
By way of another general point, this book has no photo section which is kind of too bad for many of the interesting gadgets and people he discusses.
But, to the topics:
EXTENDING THE HUMAN LIFE SPAN
This section consists of three chapters discussing the human genome project and research on artificially extending human life.
Perhaps most promising in this area was research by the Harvard School of Medicine which developed a protocol not only for halting aging actually reversing its signs in lab rats.
Here's how they did it. At the tail end of every string of DNA in your body are what is called telomeres. They function sort of like the plastic thing at the end of shoelaces by keeping the code clear of being frayed and damaged. But shoe laces, DNA code does tend to degrade over time. What the Harvard researchers did was to create a substance called telomerase which artificially replaces lost telomeres to extend DNA life span. It allows the DNA to replace itself more times and amazingly actually reverse the aging process.
But the Harvard researchers are not alone. In this book we also meet life extension researcher Aubrey de Grey. de Grey thinks aging is like a disease and he's focused in on seven areas that, if conquered, would actually conquer death itself.
Though this book provides a serviceable treatment of these issues, those wishing a more complete understanding of them are probably best referred to Long for this World which spends a book discussing these issues instead of just a few chapters.
CREATING HUMAN MACHINES
This is one of the two biggest sections in the book.
Wisely it eschews the long discussion of the history of artificial intelligence, focusing only on the emerging developments on its frontiers.
For my money, the most interesting development here is a little robot called Cog developed by Cynthia Breazeal. Going on the idea that humanity is skin deep, Cog is form fitted to be very user friendly. It's animated face moves and watches and interacts with the user.
For his part, AI founding father Marvin Minsky has scoffed at Cog saying that though Cog may seem sentient, it isn't really sentient (whatever that means). Breazeal's riposte that we can't know the answers to such questions about anything I think is quite on point.
Other research discussed involves problem solving robots and though they may have conquered a harder robot engineering problem, their result somehow doesn't seem as exciting as that of Breazeal's.
True to any book discussing human machines, this one of course involves input from Ray Kurzweil. And that's fine and good.
But as with the extending life span discussion, Kurzweil is another great example of a guy with things to say that deserve their own book. And since Kurzweil has written two of them, readers with an interest in these issues would probably be well advised to read either or both of them.
For his part, Kurzweil seems to believe that machines will achieve human like (and better) intelligence by brute force. Noting that processing power has been doubling on the order of once every two years or so, Kurzweil predicts that computers will be smarter than a human by 2020 and smarter than all humans by 2050.
Under Aubrey de Grey, Kurzweil believes his immortality won't come from telomere research and its like but rather his litteral fusion with an intelligent machine.
PROTECTING MOTHER EARTH
Along with the previous section this is one of the two biggest sections in Stevenson's book.
In it, he discusses the threat of global warming and also the threat of diminishing Earth resources.
Though he half heartedly acknowledges the wealth of scientific information that says "yes, we DO have a global warming problem" Stevenson is perhaps at his most optimist in this book by suggesting that our man made global warming problem does have man made solutions.
Most interesting of these is a process he discusses whereby excess CO2 can actually be sucked back out of the air. Though this research is in its tenative stages and could really use additional funding, this was the first time I actually felt the best about solving our global warming problem.
In terms of marshaling Earth resources, he discussed the creation of bacteria which could excrete their own gasoline and harvesting solar power...both of which are not even past their tentative stages.
WHAT IT ALL MEANS
For Stevenson, optimist that he is, all this amounts to a world like the one we have right now, but better where we live longer and are nicer to our planet.
In that sense his concluding chapters are little like a Hallmark card and a little like a long prayer.
So viewed they're fine, except when the cold reality of just emergent these researches all are.
In other words, the future may be great but it would also seem it's a long way off too.
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