Tips for Time Travelers

by Peter Cochrane

Futuristic technologies (which frighten most people) are a delight to Peter Cochrane, an internatinal speaker with Business Week's Executive Programs, and head of Research at British Telecommunications. Human cloning, identification chips implanted under the skin, digitally enhanced brains, and machines that can think--these are things which he not only believes will occur in the near future; Cochrane actually embraces these scary, science-fiction notions as natural extensions of human development. While he remains an unbashed optimist about the future of technology, he is fully cognizant about the jarring nature of rapid technology, he is fully cognizant about the jarring nature of rapid technological change, both to individuals and to societies. As little as 30 years ago, he points out, an individual would meet and communicate with only 3,000 people in their lifetime. Now, we can do so in a matter of weeks or days.

Genres: Science, Technology

225 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Peter Cochrane’s writing about war includes the award-winning Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend; the companion volume to the ABC TV series Australians at War; and two studies of wartime photography, The Western Front, 1916–18 and Tobruk 1941. Cochrane is also the author of Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, which won the Age Book of the Year award and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History, and two works of fiction: the novella Governor Bligh and the Short Man and the recently published novel The Making of Martin Sparrow.

Reviews

[Kevin O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Cochrane was the head of the research labs at British Telecommunications, and this book is a series of short essays on his ideas about future technologies. Given that this book was assembled in 1999 (I believe the individual articles were written in the 1990s), events have overtaken some of his projections, but they are still interesting. At 2 pages per essay, this is a book best dipped into rather than read at one sitting. There are 108 of these short essays in this book.

[Pixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 1997 by a early adopter of technology. It's fun to read what he got right with his predictions and also to find out about tech that is commonplace now, that was only available in labs in the late 90's.

[Nihar Thakkar · Rating 2 out of 5]

outdated book available only at a stupid library such as d one near me...
nothing special.just another book with good title but old contents