Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Future Studies

Spanning an array of horrors - the Aurora "Joker" killer; Anders Breivik; American school massacres; the suicide epidemic in Korea and Japan; and the recent spate of "austerity" suicides in Europe - Heroes dares to explore the darkest shadow cast by the contemporary obsession with relentless competition and...

The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as 'custom', has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse-outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization.

Pacific Futures asks how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the futures...

Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism might actually entail.

Could the current rise of real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender's Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of...

"Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War...could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade."
--New York Times Book Review

"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st...

Genocide and community violence, the loss of ethical landmarks and social "order," lack of confidence in the viability of the prevailing system and economic forces: the 20th century has painfully challenged all our certainties concerning society, history, and humankind. This volume offers reflections on the likely nature of the values of the 21st century and addresses questions such as whether aesthetics will prevail over ethics, whether the third industrial revolution and its forms of globalization will shatter culture as we know it, hasten the decline of thousands of languages, or give...

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....

Will tomorrow's wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network which can read their thoughts? Will war be fought with greater or lesser humanity? Will it be played out in cyberspace and further afield in Low Earth Orbit? Or will it be fought more intensely still in the sprawling cities of the developing world, the grim black holes of social exclusion on our increasingly unequal planet? Will the Great Powers reinvent conflict between themselves or is war destined to become much 'smaller' both in terms of its actors and the beliefs for which...

America is in the throes of a demographic overhaul. Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use.

Today's Millennials--well-educated, tech savvy, underemployed twenty-somethings--are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Meantime, more than 10,000 Baby...

Will tomorrow's wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network which can read their thoughts? Will war be fought with greater or lesser humanity? Will it be played out in cyberspace and further afield in Low Earth Orbit? Or will it be fought more intensely still in the sprawling cities of the developing world, the grim black holes of social exclusion on our increasingly unequal planet? Will the Great Powers reinvent conflict between themselves or is war destined to become much 'smaller' both in terms of its actors and the beliefs for which...