Take a look at CLUBOF.INFO’s pick here of the very best 10 futurist books you can download or purchase right now. Have you missed any of these titles?
#1 LIFE AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT (2013) by J. Craig Venter brings promises from the top scientist of the biotech century about the most extraordinary breakthrough of our time: synthetic life.
#2 WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS (2010) by Kevin Kelly provides a compelling story about how technology is evolving and is an unstoppable force comparable only with nature itself.
#3 UTOPISTICS (1998) by Immanuel Wallerstein predicts the historical choices awaiting the world in the Twenty-First Century, with anarchy, the loss of state legitimacy, the proliferation of technologies and the greater sensitivity of the world to radical change being the main predictions.
#4 CYPHERPUNKS (2012) by Julian Assange addresses the way the internet has been subverted and, although it has fallen prey to government spying and control, it still aids dissidents and offers great opportunities for changing society.
#5 CITIZEN CYBORG (2004) by James Hughes presents the techno-progressive interpretation of how to responsibly use and regulate emerging technologies as they transform humanity.
#6 LIBERATION BIOLOGY (2005) by Ronald Bailey is an enthusiastic case for the biotech revolution, devoid of politics and very persuasive in arguing that the greater the freedom given to people exploring such technology, the more the progress.
#7 CATALYST (2013) by Harry J. Bentham is a thesis predicting that information, transport and manufacturing technologies will become so effective that they proliferate beyond the control of their own creators, thus making such things as competition and national security obsolete.
#8 THE INFINITE RESOURCE (2013) by Ramez Naam makes the case that the grand solutions to the world’s population and resource crises will come ultimately from learning and developing new ways to use the resources we already have, rather than continually excavating new finite resources like oilfields.
#9 RADICAL ABUNDANCE (2013) by K. Eric Drexler, the founding father of what many call nanotechnology, busts many of the myths about APM (atomically precise manufacturing) while more than compensating for your disillusionment with promises of garage-sized car factories becoming possible in every home.
#10 THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR (2005) by Ray Kurzweil is a very lengthy work visiting much of the same ideas above, only with added emphasis on the AI singularity and on such celebrated ideas as Moore’s Law to argue for a future in which sentient computers learn to outperform the human brain.
Other powerful works like Abundance by Diamandis and Kotler and The Human Race to the Future by Daniel Berleant also offer key viewpoints about the future of civilization and where the decisive emerging technologies of our near future could lead us.
