We may notbe able to predict the future with accuracy, but only a tour peril do we ignore imaginative forecasts. Allan Goodman charts the future as historians map the past and in the process uncovers trends that counter conventional wisdom about persistent world problems such as ethnic conflict, environmental degradation, and economic injustice. Just as very few anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the vast changes that followed, many will resist Goodman's vision of a society in which people and robots work side by side and an international polity focuses on the principles of...