Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Future Studies

Tens of millions of people today are living part of their life in a virtual world. In places like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Free Realms, people are making friends, building communities, creating art, and making real money. Business is booming on the virtual frontier, as billions of dollars are paid in exchange for pixels on screens. But sometimes things go wrong. Virtual criminals defraud online communities in pursuit of real-world profits. People feel cheated when their avatars lose virtual property to wrongdoers. Increasingly, they turn to legal systems for solutions. But when...

Most of us assume that those in charge can always find a way to control any technology mankind creates, no matter how powerful. But in a world of imperfect human beings who are prone to error, emotion, and sometimes to malevolent behavior, this could be an arrogant--and disastrous--assumption.

This book is filled with compelling, factual stories that illustrate how easy it is for situations to go terribly wrong, despite our best efforts to prevent any issue. The author is not advocating an anti-technology "return to nature," nor intending to highlight the marvels of our high-tech world....

We are awash in predictions. In newspapers, blogs, and books; on radio and television. Every day experts tell us how the economy will perform next year, if housing sales will grow or shrink, and who will win the next election. Predictions are offered about the climate, food, technology, and the world our...

Dysfunctional cities, catastrophic climate change, ever-deepening distance from nature--today we see environmental disaster everywhere we look. In Mobilizing the Green Imagination, philosophical provocateur Anthony Weston urges us to move beyond ever more desperate attempts to "green" the status quo toward entirely different and far more inviting ecological visions:

• Life after transportation--decentralized work, inventive infill, and self-sufficient micro-communities to facilitate life in place
  
• Adaptation with attitude--cities that welcome the rising...

H.G. Wells was acclaimed during his lifetime as one of the most original and creative thinkers of the 20th century, and retains to this day a position of considerable importance in the history of ideas. In 1928 when he wrote this cry for a new age of worldwide knowledge networking, there was no Internet. Yet Wells was already convinced that if only thinking people across the planet could somehow pull together and pool their expertise, energy, and insights into sort of cerebrum for humanity, then the world would be a saner, safer, better, fairer place. Anyone aware of how the Internet...