Future Theory

For decades, the tech industry has overwhelmingly been just a software industry. Silicon Valley’s big win was disrupting Yellow Cab. What about disrupting General Motors? General Mills? General Electric? Energy, water, waste, food, manufacturing, construction—things every human on Earth relies on—have made incremental progress over the last century but have not seen the kind of exponential improvements we take for granted in computing.

FROM CHAPT 1: It has been shown recently in my work that golden ages have followed a particular path of inheritance from the Chinese concept of the dead ancestor and the venerated family member. Within Europe, Chinese knowledge was regarded with suspicion, and the concepts were treated as superstitions which had the power of philosophy. Religions converted the same dichotomy in the West into a division between the abstract and the material. Most of this text is a meaningful, exceedingly well-written, and systematic exposition on the concepts of exponential knowledge and exponential ...

Hannah Arendt's insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future, Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital essence of these concepts and use them to regain a frame of reference for the future.

The history of the films, cartoons, toys, and more: The Back to the Future series is a timeless collection that is greatly revered by all audiences. The beauty of this audiobook by Brad Gilmore is that it doesn't present the history of the film as textbook information. Gilmore discusses these films from a place of passion and so effectively reveals how the history behind the movies is just as engaging as the films themselves.

New edition, expanded and updated. With the release of Theory U almost 10 years ago, Otto Scharmer set in motion a revolution in thought. Scharmer explained that what we pay attention to and how we pay attention is key to what we create. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of and in touch with the inner place from which attention and intention originate.

Artificial intelligence is amplifying human ingenuity and disrupting the foundations of health care, military, entertainment, education, marketing and manufacturing. Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power argues that this AI-driven revolution will have an unequal impact on different segments of humanity. There will be new winners and losers, new haves and have-nots, resulting in an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power.

This cutting-edge guide not only shows how AI is transforming our careers, lives, businesses, and more, but also provides easy, actionable steps to make AI work for us.

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.

You don't have to be a computer scientist to have discerning conversations about artificial intelligence and technology. We all wonder where we're headed. Even now, technological innovations and machine learning have a daily impact on our lives, and many of us see good reasons to dread the future. Are we doomed to the surveillance society imagined in George Orwell's 1984? Mathematician and philosopher John Lennox believes that there are credible responses to the daunting questions that AI poses.

AI will be the defining development of the 21st century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand-new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work, however, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order.

Paul Scharre, a Pentagon defense expert and former U.S. Army Ranger, explores what it would mean to give machines authority over the ultimate decision of life or death. Scharre's far-ranging investigation examines the emergence of autonomous weapons, the movement to ban them, and the legal and ethical issues surrounding their use. Through interviews with defense experts, ethicists, psychologists, and activists, Scharre surveys what challenges might face "centaur warfighters" on future battlefields.

Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly 80 to 100 years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about 25 years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous, a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization.

With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide knowledge of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable.

Something new entered our world in November 2022—the first general purpose AI that could pass for a human and do the kinds of creative, innovative work that only humans could do previously. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick immediately understood what ChatGPT meant: after millions of years on our own, humans had developed a kind of co-intelligence that could augment, or even replace, human thinking. Through his writing, speaking, and teaching, Mollick has become one of the most prominent and provocative explainers of AI.

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.”

In the 16th century, control of colonies and gold bullion gave Spain the edge; 17th-century Netherlands profited from trade and finance; 18th-century France gained from its larger population, while 19th-century British power rested on its primacy in the Industrial Revolution and its navy. In the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, power resources were measured in terms of nuclear missiles, industrial capacity, and numbers of men under arms and tanks lined up ready to cross the plains of Eastern Europe. But the global information age of the 21st century is quickly rendering these traditional markers of power obsolete, remapping power relationships

In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent - really - are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the way, she introduces the dominant methods of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought that led to recent achievements.

Unlock the power of ChatGPT and DALL·E to create passive income and live on your terms. Whether you're looking to earn extra money, achieve financial independence, or explore new opportunities, this guide shows you how to succeed, even with no prior AI experience.

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: The union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

“DIVIDED WE FALL” The Shocking 2024 Presidential Election Bitterness and anger within the U.S. came to a boiling point beginning in the 2016 presidential election over immigration, abortion, rising crime, wokeism and critical race theory. The divisions have grown with each subsequent election, but new challenges have emerged, including inflation and the wars in Ukraine and Israel. In 2025, President-elect Trump is implementing extreme changes to our border security, immigration, economic, and foreign policy, while shrinking the size and scope of the federal government. Every move is ...