Showing titles in Future Studies

Future Shock is about the present. Future Shock is about what is happening today to people and groups who are overwhelmed by change. Change affects our products, communities, organizations - even our patterns of friendship and love. Future Shock vividly describes the emerging global civilization: tomorrow's family life, the rise of new businesses, subcultures, lifestyles, and human relationships - all of them temporary. It illuminates the world of tomorrow by exploding countless cliches about today.

What leads to political turbulence and social breakdown? How do elites maintain their dominant position? And why do ruling classes sometimes suddenly lose their grip on power? For decades, complexity scientist Peter Turchin has been studying world history like no one else. Assembling vast databases mined from 10,000 years of human activity, and then developing new models, he has transformed the way we learn from the past. End Times is the result: a ground-breaking account of how society works.

From politics to economics, from tech to the study of how we live, things are changing fast. Old certainties are crumbling, and we need new solutions to shake up the status quo and shape the future. In The Spark, Helen Lewis meets 11 radical thinkers who are bidding to change our world, and puts their ideas under the spotlight to find out what they have to offer compared to the failures of the past.

Artificial intelligence is driving workforce disruption on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. In schools and universities, AI technology has forced a re-evaluation of the way students are taught and assessed. Meanwhile ChatGPT has become a cultural phenomenon, reaching 100 million users and attracting a $10 billion dollar investment in its parent company OpenAI. The race to dominate the generative AI market is accelerating at breakneck speed, inspiring breathless headlines and immense public interest.

First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future.

Lee, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than fifty years on the world stage. Almost single-handedly responsible for transforming Singapore into a Western-style economic success, he offers a unique perspective on the geopolitics of East and West. American presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama have welcomed him to the White House.

This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.

In The Next 100 Years, Friedman turns his eye on the future. Drawing on a profound understanding of history and geopolitical patterns dating back to the Roman Empire, he shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, experiencing the dawn of a new historical cycle.

The Mobile Wave argues that the changes brought by mobile computing are so big and widespread that it’s impossible for us to see it all, even though we are all immersed in it. Saylor explains that the current generation of mobile smart phones and tablet computers has set the stage to become the universal computing platform for the world. In the hands of billions of people and accessible anywhere and anytime, mobile computers are poised to become an appendage of the human being and an essential tool for modern life.

Was sind die großen Herausforderungen, vor denen die Menschheit steht? Wer sind wir und was sollen wir mit unserem Leben anfangen? Seit Jahrtausenden fragt die Menschheit nach dem Sinn des Lebens. Doch jetzt setzen uns die ökologische Krise, die wachsende Bedrohung durch Massenvernichtungswaffen und der Aufstieg neuer disruptiver Technologien unter Zeitdruck. Irgendjemand wird darüber entscheiden müssen, wie wir die Macht nutzen, die künstliche Intelligenz und Biotechnologie bereit halten. Yuval Noah Harari will Menschen dazu anregen, sich an den großen Debatten unserer Zeit zu beteiligen.

In The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen investigates the cultural and emotional shifts that accompany our embrace of technology. In warm, philosophical prose, Rosen reveals key human experiences at risk of going extinct, including face-to-face communication, sense of place, authentic emotion, and even boredom. Considering cultural trends, like TikTok challenges and mukbang, and politically unsettling phenomena, like sociometric trackers and online conspiracy culture, Rosen exposes an unprecedented shift in the human condition, one that habituates us to alienation and control.

Once upon a time, the world was neatly divided into prosperous and backward economies. Babies were plentiful, workers outnumbered retirees and people aspiring towards the middle class yearned to own homes and cars. Companies didn't need to see any further than Europe and the US to do well. Printed money was legal tender for all debts. We grew up learning how to 'play the game', and we expected the rules to remain the same as we took our first job, started a family, saw our children grow up and went into retirement with our finances secure. That world - and those rules - are over.

Sensationalism about AI has reached new heights, and getting a useful understanding of it has never been more important. AI will extend and accelerate thinking, delivering unprecedented abundance. But it will also require us to navigate a path of challenges ranging from today’s issues of bias, privacy, and explainability, to job displacement through automation, and a future coexistence with superintelligent machines. This book is the roadmap to that path.

The author of the acclaimed New York Times best seller The Next 100 Years now focuses his geopolitical forecasting acumen on the next decade and the imminent events and challenges that will test America and the world, specifically addressing the skills that will be required by the decade’s leaders. The next 10 years will be a time of massive transition. In The Next Decade, George Friedman offers listeners a pro­vocative and endlessly fascinating prognosis for the immedi­ate future.

The Third Wave makes startling sense of the violent changes now battering our world. Its sweeping synthesis casts fresh light on our new forms of marriage and family, on today's dramatic changes in business and economics. It explains the role of cults, the new definitions of work, play, love, and success. It points toward new forms of 21st-century democracy.

Humans, it turns out, are intrinsically wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term prosperity. Kristian Rönn, an entrepreneur formerly affiliated with the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, calls these deeply rooted impulses “Darwinian demons.” These forces, a by-product of natural selection, can lead us to act in shortsighted ways that harm others—and even imperil our survival as a species. If this evolutionary glitch is left unchecked, the consequences will grow in magnitude as the power of technology accelerates.

We are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. The Fourth Age provides extraordinary background information on how we got to this point, and how - rather than what - we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing: machine consciousness, automation, employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity.

Würden wir eine Zeitreise in die Zeit vor 500 Jahren oder 500 Jahre in die Zukunft machen, wären wir erschüttert, wie sehr sich Technik und Medizin verändert haben. Die geopolitische Ordnung würde für uns keinen Sinn ergeben. Die Sprache wäre uns völlig fremd. Und doch müssten wir in dieser uns vollkommen unbekannten Welt die Menschen nur wenige Minuten beobachten und würden sagen: »Ah, das habe ich schon einmal gesehen.« Denn uns würden zahlreiche universelle Verhaltensweisen begegnen: Menschen, die von Angst, Neid und Gier angetrieben werden; Menschen, die blind vor Selbstüberschätzung fatale Entscheidungen treffen.

The digital age we live in is as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, and Joshua Cooper Ramo explains how to survive. If you find yourself longing for a disconnected world where information is not always at your fingertips, you may eventually be as useful as the carriage maker post-Henry Ford. It's practically impossible to know where the marriage of imagination and technology will take us (sorry, Betamax and Kodak), and the only certainty is that in the networked world we will only become more intertwined.

Demokratie und Wohlstand, ein längeres Leben, mehr Gleichberechtigung und Bildung: Der Kapitalismus hat viel Positives bewirkt. Zugleich ruiniert er jedoch Klima und Umwelt, sodass die Menschheit nun existenziell gefährdet ist. "Grünes Wachstum" soll die Rettung sein, aber Wirtschaftsexpertin und Bestsellerautorin Ulrike Herrmann hält dagegen: Verständlich und messerscharf erklärt sie in ihrem neuen Hörbuch, warum wir stattdessen "grünes Schrumpfen" brauchen. Die Klimakrise verschärft sich täglich, aber konkret ändert sich fast nichts.