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Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World
Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.
351 pages, Hardcover
First published July 21, 2008
6 people are currently reading
277 people want to read
About the author
David D. Friedman
20 books145 followersfrom amazon.com:
I am an academic economist currently employed as a law professor, although I have never taken a course for credit in either field. My specialty, insofar as I have one, is the economic analysis of law, the subject of my book _Law's Order_.
In recent years I have created and taught two new law school seminars at Santa Clara University. One was on legal issues of the 21st century, discussing revolutions that might occur as a result of technological change over the next few decades. Interested readers can find its contents in the manuscript of _Future Imperfect_, linked to my web page. Topics included encryption, genetic engineering, surveillance, and many others. The other seminar, which I am currently teaching, is on legal systems very different from ours. Its topics included the legal systems of modern gypsies, Imperial China, Ancient Athens, the Cheyenne Indians, ... . My web page has a link to the seminar web page.
I have been involved in recreational medievalism, via the Society for Creative Anachronism, for over thirty years. My interests there include cooking from medieval cookbooks, making medieval jewelery, telling medieval stories around a campfire creating a believable medieval islamic persona and fighting with sword and shield.
My involvement with libertarianism goes back even further. Among other things I have written on the possibility of replacing government with private institutions to enforce rights and settle disputes, a project sometimes labelled "anarcho-capitalism" and explored in my first book, _The Machinery of Freedom_, published in 1972 and still in print.
My most recent writing project is my first novel, _Harald_. Most of my interests feed into it in one way or another, but it is intended as a story, not a tract on political philosophy, law or economics. It is not exactly a fantasy, since there is no magic, nor quite a historical novel, since the history and geography are invented. The technology and social institutions are based on medieval and classical examples, with one notable exception.
I am an academic economist currently employed as a law professor, although I have never taken a course for credit in either field. My specialty, insofar as I have one, is the economic analysis of law, the subject of my book _Law's Order_.
In recent years I have created and taught two new law school seminars at Santa Clara University. One was on legal issues of the 21st century, discussing revolutions that might occur as a result of technological change over the next few decades. Interested readers can find its contents in the manuscript of _Future Imperfect_, linked to my web page. Topics included encryption, genetic engineering, surveillance, and many others. The other seminar, which I am currently teaching, is on legal systems very different from ours. Its topics included the legal systems of modern gypsies, Imperial China, Ancient Athens, the Cheyenne Indians, ... . My web page has a link to the seminar web page.
I have been involved in recreational medievalism, via the Society for Creative Anachronism, for over thirty years. My interests there include cooking from medieval cookbooks, making medieval jewelery, telling medieval stories around a campfire creating a believable medieval islamic persona and fighting with sword and shield.
My involvement with libertarianism goes back even further. Among other things I have written on the possibility of replacing government with private institutions to enforce rights and settle disputes, a project sometimes labelled "anarcho-capitalism" and explored in my first book, _The Machinery of Freedom_, published in 1972 and still in print.
My most recent writing project is my first novel, _Harald_. Most of my interests feed into it in one way or another, but it is intended as a story, not a tract on political philosophy, law or economics. It is not exactly a fantasy, since there is no magic, nor quite a historical novel, since the history and geography are invented. The technology and social institutions are based on medieval and classical examples, with one notable exception.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 1, 2020
How will predictable improvements in technology transform everyday life, politics, and society? Good idea for a book. In our lifetimes we can expect everyday life to noticeably change from most of the following:
-Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance, data collection, data storage, and data mining.
-Changing global climate, different weather, altered seasons, worse extreme weather events.
-Much better AI and pseudo-intelligent machine interfaces.
-Detailed and immersive VR, in particular for games and fiction.
-Cheap and extremely dangerous bioterrorism.
-Gene-edited humans walking around.
-A much wealthier world, barring some collapse.
Some but not all of these topics are covered in this book. But the coverage is marred by serious flaws, especially:
1. Lack of research.
2. Rambling and anecdote-filled prose style.
3. Lack of curiosity.
1. The author gives the impression of having read the most famous book in an area and then riffing on it with a law and economics boilerplate analysis ("whose incentives? what contracts?") filled out with abundant personal anecdotes and urban legends. Technical details are kept extremely vague. So on privacy he discusses Brin's Transparent Society, on nanotech Drexler, on AI Kurzweil... but he isn't reading the surrounding literature and presenting his informed judgment, he's reading that one book and singing along with his priors. When the topic is close to his expertise, like criminal law and contracts, the low-research speculation can be interesting and insightful, but otherwise...
2. The thinness of background research is further diluted by the many digressions on personal stories and secondhand anecdotes.
Some years ago I gave a lecture in Italy over the telephone from my home office in San Jose. From my end it felt too much like talking into a void. A year or two later I repeated the experiment with better technology. This time I was sitting in a videoconferencing room. My audience in the Netherlands could see me and I could see them.
...
A few years ago, I participated in a conference called to advise a presidential panel investigating the threat of high-tech terrorism.
Retelling conversations he's had:
I once got into an interesting conversation with someone who had precisely the opposite problem. He was in the computer gaming business – online role-playing games in which large numbers of characters, each controlled by a different player, interact in a common universe, allying, fighting each other, gaining experience, becoming more powerful, acquiring enchanted swords, books of spells, and the like.
...
Many years ago I was a witness to a shooting; one result was the opportunity for a certain amount of casual conversation with police officers.
Working on his tight five:
In virtual reality, gold is as cheap as anything else. If you do not believe me, take a look at one of the gaudier bits of a good video game – the Durance of Hate in Diablo II, say.
...
One alternative is to transfer wealth in ways that do not depend on stable institutions, perhaps by burying a collection of valuable objects somewhere and preserving their location only in memory. That tactic faces risks as well – you may be revived, dig up your treasure, and discover that gold coins and rare stamps are no longer worth very much. If only you had known, you would have buried ten first editions of this book instead.
Narrating scenes from movies:
The hero of The President’s Analyst (James Coburn), having spent much of the film evading various bad guys who want to kidnap him and use him to influence his star patient, has temporarily escaped his pursuers and made it to a phone booth. He calls up a friendly CIA agent (Godfrey Cambridge) to come rescue him. When he tries to leave the booth, the door won’t open. Down the road comes a phone company truck loaded with booths. The truck’s crane picks up the one containing the analyst, deposits it in the back, replaces it with an empty booth, and drives off. A minute later a helicopter descends containing the CIA agent and a KGB agent who is his temporary ally. They look in astonishment at the empty phone booth. The American speaks first:
“It can’t be. Every phone in America tapped?” The response (you will have to imagine the accent) “Vhere do you think you are – Russia?”
A great scene in a very funny movie. But it may not be a joke much longer.
All of this could be deleted without loss.
3. The author will make claims of the form "I have no idea if this is true and I haven't done a trivial search, or analyzed it any further, but here's my take". As a reader, this is annoying.
In discussing the problem of cheating in games where game state is computed locally:
In the online gaming world, where many players are technically sophisticated, competitive, and unscrupulous – or, if you prefer, where many players regard competitive cheating as merely another dimension of the game – it is apparently a real problem. I offered him a solution; I do not know if he, or anyone else, has tried implementing it.
The server cannot be bothered to keep track of all the details of all the characters, but it can probably manage 1 in 100. Pick a character at random and, while his computer is calculating what is happening to him, run a parallel calculation on the server. Follow him for a few days, checking to make sure that his characteristics remain what they should be. If they do, switch to someone else.
So he didn't know whether his obvious idea (have the server randomly check their work) was a known solution, and didn't take two minutes to look it up, ever, but DID include the story of his eureka moment in his book anyway? Why?
Elsewhere, he tosses off arguments in accordance with a kind of edgelord satisficing algorithm: once an edgy vignette is discovered, stop analysis and move on.
Many years ago I was a witness to a shooting; one result was the opportunity for a certain amount of casual conversation with police officers. One of them advised me that, if I ever happened to shoot a burglar, there were two things I should make sure of: that he ended up dead and that the body ended up inside my house.
His advice is to murder them if they're wounded, and also move the body indoors, possibly leaving a blood trail (do you then clean it up? what do you say to the detectives?), weird ballistics (or shot in the back), maybe trouble with witnesses. Maybe lie about that at the trial too? I don't know how good this advice is, but it's definitely edgy and memorable!
Fantasizing about 120 year old men catfishing college freshmen:
While thinking about how to spend your second century, you might want to consider the social consequences of eliminating the markers of age. In a world where aging is entirely under our control, a young woman of 20 might be dating a young man 100 years older than she is – and he might or might not tell her. The same thing already happens online, where a flirtatious twelve-year-old girl may be almost anything, including a forty-year-old male FBI agent. If you, a grandfather with a retirement pension and a century behind you, could go back to college as a freshman, would you? Part-time? Lots of cute girls. The women of your own generation are just as cute, thanks to the same advanced biotech that makes you eighteen again, but the real thing has its charms. Perhaps.
Perhaps! But in a future world with aging-reversal miracle drugs, there are probably sufficient search engines and social networks to tell if someone was born 20 or 120 years ago. And he spent another chapter talking about the end of privacy...
Bravely suggesting that the solution to cyberterrorism is to make ordinary cybercrime legal:
I did, however, come up with one positive contribution to the conference. If you really believe that foreign terrorists breaking into computers in order to commit massive sabotage is a problem, the solution is to give the people who own computers adequate incentives to protect them, to set up their software in ways that make it hard to break in. One way of doing so would be to decriminalize ordinary intrusions. If the owner of a computer cannot call the cops when he finds that some talented teenager has been rifling through his files, he has an incentive to make it harder to do so in order to protect himself. Once the computers of America are safe against Kevin Mitnick,3 Osama bin Laden won’t have a chance. [here the chapter ends]
For some values of the supply and elasticity of cybercrime, the capacity of ordinary individuals to harden their home systems, the extent to which the marginal target (retirement home resident?) would have that capacity, the difference in sophistication between the ordinary hacker and the cyberterrorist, the relative costs of individual system hardening vs. being a victim of a crime & of being a victim of a crime vs. being a victim of cyberterrorism, the efficacy of the police in catching either type of malefactor, the responsiveness of hackers and terrorists (respectively) to system-hardening and criminal prosecution (respectively), this dumb-on-its-face proposal COULD possibly sort of make sense. But he doesn't bother. He doesn't take his ideas seriously, so why should you?
Speculating on immortal dictators:
The effect on undemocratic systems might be even worse. In a world without aging it seems likely that Salazar would still rule Portugal and Franco Spain. It would have been Stalin, equipped with an arsenal of thermonuclear missiles, who presided over, and did his best to prevent, the final disintegration of the Soviet Union. With the aging problem solved, dictatorship could become a permanent condition. Provided, of course, that dictators took sufficient precautions against other sources of mortality.
Is his prediction really that Salazar and Franco would be ruling in a counterfactual 2008 (year of publication) where anti-aging drugs were discovered in the 1940s? If forced to stop and think about this scenario, would he really continue to say it's *likely*?
And what is the overall effect? Dictators no longer die of old age, but this also removes the violent and dangerous succession struggles that can tip stable dictatorial regimes into civil war, with much worse consequences for the populace. And increased dictator lifespan doesn't prevent exogenous cultural/demographic/international forces from weakening and ending the dictatorship. Maybe an increased death rate for dictators is a net social good for that country (so maybe targeted assassinations are also good?), but maybe the reverse, that reducing 'dictatorial churn' is preferable and most dictatorships end by pathways other than {natural death of old age -> democracy}; maybe political scientists have even looked into this question and produced some summary statistics and stylized facts. But he doesn't bother; his mind rounds to the nearest edgy image– "immortal Stalin with thermonuclear weapons"– and the analysis terminates before it begins.
Overall an interesting topic and some good points, particularly in areas close to his core expertise like contract law and criminal law. But the good parts are too few and far between to make the book worth recommending.
-Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance, data collection, data storage, and data mining.
-Changing global climate, different weather, altered seasons, worse extreme weather events.
-Much better AI and pseudo-intelligent machine interfaces.
-Detailed and immersive VR, in particular for games and fiction.
-Cheap and extremely dangerous bioterrorism.
-Gene-edited humans walking around.
-A much wealthier world, barring some collapse.
Some but not all of these topics are covered in this book. But the coverage is marred by serious flaws, especially:
1. Lack of research.
2. Rambling and anecdote-filled prose style.
3. Lack of curiosity.
1. The author gives the impression of having read the most famous book in an area and then riffing on it with a law and economics boilerplate analysis ("whose incentives? what contracts?") filled out with abundant personal anecdotes and urban legends. Technical details are kept extremely vague. So on privacy he discusses Brin's Transparent Society, on nanotech Drexler, on AI Kurzweil... but he isn't reading the surrounding literature and presenting his informed judgment, he's reading that one book and singing along with his priors. When the topic is close to his expertise, like criminal law and contracts, the low-research speculation can be interesting and insightful, but otherwise...
2. The thinness of background research is further diluted by the many digressions on personal stories and secondhand anecdotes.
Some years ago I gave a lecture in Italy over the telephone from my home office in San Jose. From my end it felt too much like talking into a void. A year or two later I repeated the experiment with better technology. This time I was sitting in a videoconferencing room. My audience in the Netherlands could see me and I could see them.
...
A few years ago, I participated in a conference called to advise a presidential panel investigating the threat of high-tech terrorism.
Retelling conversations he's had:
I once got into an interesting conversation with someone who had precisely the opposite problem. He was in the computer gaming business – online role-playing games in which large numbers of characters, each controlled by a different player, interact in a common universe, allying, fighting each other, gaining experience, becoming more powerful, acquiring enchanted swords, books of spells, and the like.
...
Many years ago I was a witness to a shooting; one result was the opportunity for a certain amount of casual conversation with police officers.
Working on his tight five:
In virtual reality, gold is as cheap as anything else. If you do not believe me, take a look at one of the gaudier bits of a good video game – the Durance of Hate in Diablo II, say.
...
One alternative is to transfer wealth in ways that do not depend on stable institutions, perhaps by burying a collection of valuable objects somewhere and preserving their location only in memory. That tactic faces risks as well – you may be revived, dig up your treasure, and discover that gold coins and rare stamps are no longer worth very much. If only you had known, you would have buried ten first editions of this book instead.
Narrating scenes from movies:
The hero of The President’s Analyst (James Coburn), having spent much of the film evading various bad guys who want to kidnap him and use him to influence his star patient, has temporarily escaped his pursuers and made it to a phone booth. He calls up a friendly CIA agent (Godfrey Cambridge) to come rescue him. When he tries to leave the booth, the door won’t open. Down the road comes a phone company truck loaded with booths. The truck’s crane picks up the one containing the analyst, deposits it in the back, replaces it with an empty booth, and drives off. A minute later a helicopter descends containing the CIA agent and a KGB agent who is his temporary ally. They look in astonishment at the empty phone booth. The American speaks first:
“It can’t be. Every phone in America tapped?” The response (you will have to imagine the accent) “Vhere do you think you are – Russia?”
A great scene in a very funny movie. But it may not be a joke much longer.
All of this could be deleted without loss.
3. The author will make claims of the form "I have no idea if this is true and I haven't done a trivial search, or analyzed it any further, but here's my take". As a reader, this is annoying.
In discussing the problem of cheating in games where game state is computed locally:
In the online gaming world, where many players are technically sophisticated, competitive, and unscrupulous – or, if you prefer, where many players regard competitive cheating as merely another dimension of the game – it is apparently a real problem. I offered him a solution; I do not know if he, or anyone else, has tried implementing it.
The server cannot be bothered to keep track of all the details of all the characters, but it can probably manage 1 in 100. Pick a character at random and, while his computer is calculating what is happening to him, run a parallel calculation on the server. Follow him for a few days, checking to make sure that his characteristics remain what they should be. If they do, switch to someone else.
So he didn't know whether his obvious idea (have the server randomly check their work) was a known solution, and didn't take two minutes to look it up, ever, but DID include the story of his eureka moment in his book anyway? Why?
Elsewhere, he tosses off arguments in accordance with a kind of edgelord satisficing algorithm: once an edgy vignette is discovered, stop analysis and move on.
Many years ago I was a witness to a shooting; one result was the opportunity for a certain amount of casual conversation with police officers. One of them advised me that, if I ever happened to shoot a burglar, there were two things I should make sure of: that he ended up dead and that the body ended up inside my house.
His advice is to murder them if they're wounded, and also move the body indoors, possibly leaving a blood trail (do you then clean it up? what do you say to the detectives?), weird ballistics (or shot in the back), maybe trouble with witnesses. Maybe lie about that at the trial too? I don't know how good this advice is, but it's definitely edgy and memorable!
Fantasizing about 120 year old men catfishing college freshmen:
While thinking about how to spend your second century, you might want to consider the social consequences of eliminating the markers of age. In a world where aging is entirely under our control, a young woman of 20 might be dating a young man 100 years older than she is – and he might or might not tell her. The same thing already happens online, where a flirtatious twelve-year-old girl may be almost anything, including a forty-year-old male FBI agent. If you, a grandfather with a retirement pension and a century behind you, could go back to college as a freshman, would you? Part-time? Lots of cute girls. The women of your own generation are just as cute, thanks to the same advanced biotech that makes you eighteen again, but the real thing has its charms. Perhaps.
Perhaps! But in a future world with aging-reversal miracle drugs, there are probably sufficient search engines and social networks to tell if someone was born 20 or 120 years ago. And he spent another chapter talking about the end of privacy...
Bravely suggesting that the solution to cyberterrorism is to make ordinary cybercrime legal:
I did, however, come up with one positive contribution to the conference. If you really believe that foreign terrorists breaking into computers in order to commit massive sabotage is a problem, the solution is to give the people who own computers adequate incentives to protect them, to set up their software in ways that make it hard to break in. One way of doing so would be to decriminalize ordinary intrusions. If the owner of a computer cannot call the cops when he finds that some talented teenager has been rifling through his files, he has an incentive to make it harder to do so in order to protect himself. Once the computers of America are safe against Kevin Mitnick,3 Osama bin Laden won’t have a chance. [here the chapter ends]
For some values of the supply and elasticity of cybercrime, the capacity of ordinary individuals to harden their home systems, the extent to which the marginal target (retirement home resident?) would have that capacity, the difference in sophistication between the ordinary hacker and the cyberterrorist, the relative costs of individual system hardening vs. being a victim of a crime & of being a victim of a crime vs. being a victim of cyberterrorism, the efficacy of the police in catching either type of malefactor, the responsiveness of hackers and terrorists (respectively) to system-hardening and criminal prosecution (respectively), this dumb-on-its-face proposal COULD possibly sort of make sense. But he doesn't bother. He doesn't take his ideas seriously, so why should you?
Speculating on immortal dictators:
The effect on undemocratic systems might be even worse. In a world without aging it seems likely that Salazar would still rule Portugal and Franco Spain. It would have been Stalin, equipped with an arsenal of thermonuclear missiles, who presided over, and did his best to prevent, the final disintegration of the Soviet Union. With the aging problem solved, dictatorship could become a permanent condition. Provided, of course, that dictators took sufficient precautions against other sources of mortality.
Is his prediction really that Salazar and Franco would be ruling in a counterfactual 2008 (year of publication) where anti-aging drugs were discovered in the 1940s? If forced to stop and think about this scenario, would he really continue to say it's *likely*?
And what is the overall effect? Dictators no longer die of old age, but this also removes the violent and dangerous succession struggles that can tip stable dictatorial regimes into civil war, with much worse consequences for the populace. And increased dictator lifespan doesn't prevent exogenous cultural/demographic/international forces from weakening and ending the dictatorship. Maybe an increased death rate for dictators is a net social good for that country (so maybe targeted assassinations are also good?), but maybe the reverse, that reducing 'dictatorial churn' is preferable and most dictatorships end by pathways other than {natural death of old age -> democracy}; maybe political scientists have even looked into this question and produced some summary statistics and stylized facts. But he doesn't bother; his mind rounds to the nearest edgy image– "immortal Stalin with thermonuclear weapons"– and the analysis terminates before it begins.
Overall an interesting topic and some good points, particularly in areas close to his core expertise like contract law and criminal law. But the good parts are too few and far between to make the book worth recommending.
January 4, 2013
An insightful look at how rapid advances in technology, including genetic engineering and anonymity in cyberspace, may affect our society from privacy, to investments, to family planning, to legal implications. However, it is by no means comprehensive or objective. Friedman raises great points for contemplation, but interjects his own beliefs and philosophies.
October 27, 2020
[Note: I received a free version of the audiobook in expectation that I would produce a review.]
Future Imperfect is a broad-ranging, multidisciplinary exploration of potential future technologies and their possible ramifications, written by an intellectual renaissance man* (okay, medieval man). If this is the sort of thing that you find interesting or entertaining, I think you'll enjoy this book and the author's unique perspective.
My primary concern before reading it (in 2020), was that the book was published in 2008 --- would it still be worth reading in 2020?
After reading: yes. The book largely holds up, and the author has thoughtfully added several postscripts to the recently recorded audio edition to comment on developments since the original publication. (Unfortunately, they are relatively short.) Many technologies speculated upon are still speculative, or they have been somewhat realized, and we are beginning to face some of the issues that the author described. Some are out-of-date or not particularly relevant, but these are the exception. (E.g. there's a chapter describing possible methods of creating "e-cash." Given the explosion of cryptocurrencies since then and my relative ignorance of both topics, I couldn't always tell which of his predictions were realized, which were made obsolete, and which were still potentially in the future.)
If you're curious about the book or the topics covered, there's a webbed version, but I do recommend the new audiobook edition. The production quality is not top-tier, but it's read by the author, and that lends it a bit of charm: it feels just a step or two away from attending a lecture or being in conversation. It's written not as an academic textbook, but in a more informal tone, with personality and some enjoyable (and much appreciated) splashes of humor --- so despite the depth of the ideas within, it's not hard to follow aurally.
I'll definitely be checking out some of the author's other works.
*From wikipedia: David Director Friedman (born February 12, 1945) is an American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist theorist.
Future Imperfect is a broad-ranging, multidisciplinary exploration of potential future technologies and their possible ramifications, written by an intellectual renaissance man* (okay, medieval man). If this is the sort of thing that you find interesting or entertaining, I think you'll enjoy this book and the author's unique perspective.
My primary concern before reading it (in 2020), was that the book was published in 2008 --- would it still be worth reading in 2020?
After reading: yes. The book largely holds up, and the author has thoughtfully added several postscripts to the recently recorded audio edition to comment on developments since the original publication. (Unfortunately, they are relatively short.) Many technologies speculated upon are still speculative, or they have been somewhat realized, and we are beginning to face some of the issues that the author described. Some are out-of-date or not particularly relevant, but these are the exception. (E.g. there's a chapter describing possible methods of creating "e-cash." Given the explosion of cryptocurrencies since then and my relative ignorance of both topics, I couldn't always tell which of his predictions were realized, which were made obsolete, and which were still potentially in the future.)
If you're curious about the book or the topics covered, there's a webbed version, but I do recommend the new audiobook edition. The production quality is not top-tier, but it's read by the author, and that lends it a bit of charm: it feels just a step or two away from attending a lecture or being in conversation. It's written not as an academic textbook, but in a more informal tone, with personality and some enjoyable (and much appreciated) splashes of humor --- so despite the depth of the ideas within, it's not hard to follow aurally.
I'll definitely be checking out some of the author's other works.
*From wikipedia: David Director Friedman (born February 12, 1945) is an American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist theorist.
April 16, 2009
Why I Read this Book: I'm not sure I remember how I learned about it; it may have been a link from Amazon. There's a nice and provocative blurb on the back from Jerry Pournelle; it may have incited my interest.
I don't believe in the ability to predict the future in any meaningful way on timescales of more than a few years; per Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan , seemingly-small effects (e.g. technological changes) can lead to large, unexpected shifts (which later get rationalized as being minor and entirely predictable). I do think, however, that it's very valuable to examine areas that may have a tremendous impact in the future. Friedman's book examines 19 such areas, and does so with remarkable clear-headedness and lucidity.
I liked this book a lot; I wish more authors could be this clear, and this unafraid to examine controversial areas without trying to hide their opinions. I'm not quite willing to say this book "was amazing", though, because it felt like Friedman chose topics based on his interests (and knowledge) while ignoring certain others. For instance, it seems quite likely to me that the future of energy will have a large impact on our civilization; probably more so than the prospects for cryonics. Yet Friedman only has a brief mention of the former, while spending some time (and footnotes) on the latter.
(Finished < 2009-04-07 9:00am EDT)
I don't believe in the ability to predict the future in any meaningful way on timescales of more than a few years; per Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan , seemingly-small effects (e.g. technological changes) can lead to large, unexpected shifts (which later get rationalized as being minor and entirely predictable). I do think, however, that it's very valuable to examine areas that may have a tremendous impact in the future. Friedman's book examines 19 such areas, and does so with remarkable clear-headedness and lucidity.
I liked this book a lot; I wish more authors could be this clear, and this unafraid to examine controversial areas without trying to hide their opinions. I'm not quite willing to say this book "was amazing", though, because it felt like Friedman chose topics based on his interests (and knowledge) while ignoring certain others. For instance, it seems quite likely to me that the future of energy will have a large impact on our civilization; probably more so than the prospects for cryonics. Yet Friedman only has a brief mention of the former, while spending some time (and footnotes) on the latter.
(Finished < 2009-04-07 9:00am EDT)
January 18, 2010
This is a daring and provocative book which speculates about a wide range of topics from an elevator into space to colonizing and mining asteroids to mind-enhancing drugs. The first two sections are about privacy, technology and online business.This is extended on with discussions of the future of crime and law enforcement. Next comes a discussion of biotechnologies. And finally a serious of five chapters highlight "the real science fiction" - topics such as the future of biowarfare, nanotechnologies and space.
The author clearly has a broad mind and a lot of experience on different topics but even so the author is a law professor with economics background and much of the analysis - particularly on the internet - has a legal and economic slant to it. There are many interesting discussions and ideas but overall I think there is a bit too much focus on the internet and electronic technologies instead of other topics.
The treatment for instance of green technologies and global warming is rather limited. In the last chapter the author expresses skepticisim about global warming as a problem. Part of this is based on economics - the scares about population explosion and food shortages from two decades ago turned out not to be a problem because of responses. Part of this is based on the idea that there are also positive consequences from warming for some regions in the world and for things such as photosynthesis. But the main point the author makes is that the impact is rather far into the future and there are many things we simply do not know - but these are exactly the sort of topics covered by the book.
The author clearly has a broad mind and a lot of experience on different topics but even so the author is a law professor with economics background and much of the analysis - particularly on the internet - has a legal and economic slant to it. There are many interesting discussions and ideas but overall I think there is a bit too much focus on the internet and electronic technologies instead of other topics.
The treatment for instance of green technologies and global warming is rather limited. In the last chapter the author expresses skepticisim about global warming as a problem. Part of this is based on economics - the scares about population explosion and food shortages from two decades ago turned out not to be a problem because of responses. Part of this is based on the idea that there are also positive consequences from warming for some regions in the world and for things such as photosynthesis. But the main point the author makes is that the impact is rather far into the future and there are many things we simply do not know - but these are exactly the sort of topics covered by the book.
July 9, 2009
i found author generally sexist and old fashioned in attitude and explanation, despite his goal of testing future ideas.
introduction to public key private key technology
claims of anonymous action in future cyberspace
author is liberatarian - or was brought to UO law school to speak by heritage society. his talk and book bring different ideas to me.
one way to make money in anonymity (which govt objects too, because it has difficult, if not impossible to tax/ track criminal activity), is reputation-based services - like ebay, but with stronger encryption and privacy.
one claim (if i got it right) - was that one reason not to worry about global warming is that future technology could eliminate the risk. e.g. nanomachines could change the composition of the atmosphere and fix ozone or CO2 problems. (nanomachines could also self-replicate and thus cause irreversible destruction as well)
introduction to public key private key technology
claims of anonymous action in future cyberspace
author is liberatarian - or was brought to UO law school to speak by heritage society. his talk and book bring different ideas to me.
one way to make money in anonymity (which govt objects too, because it has difficult, if not impossible to tax/ track criminal activity), is reputation-based services - like ebay, but with stronger encryption and privacy.
one claim (if i got it right) - was that one reason not to worry about global warming is that future technology could eliminate the risk. e.g. nanomachines could change the composition of the atmosphere and fix ozone or CO2 problems. (nanomachines could also self-replicate and thus cause irreversible destruction as well)
April 1, 2013
Een boeiende introductie van een 20-tal technologische voorspellingen en hun maatschappelijke impact voor de komende 50 jaar. Detail en achterliggende redeneringen zijn niet altijd even goed uitgewerkt (bv. stukken uit het deel BioTech) - maar lezen vlot en voor wie meer wil zijn er genoeg referenties (bv. Kurzweil).
De auteur heeft duidelijk een economisch-juridische achtergrond, wat een unieke insteek geeft - meer aandacht voor het ethische vind je eerder in boeken zoals "de maakbare mens".
Het boek is een aanrader voor iedereen die zich een beeld wil vormen van de grootte orde veranderingen de komende decennia: het blijft orakelen, maar bereidt je voor om veranderingen, die er minstens deels zullen aankomen, positief te kaderen. En om binnen 50 jaar nog eens goed te lachen...
De auteur heeft duidelijk een economisch-juridische achtergrond, wat een unieke insteek geeft - meer aandacht voor het ethische vind je eerder in boeken zoals "de maakbare mens".
Het boek is een aanrader voor iedereen die zich een beeld wil vormen van de grootte orde veranderingen de komende decennia: het blijft orakelen, maar bereidt je voor om veranderingen, die er minstens deels zullen aankomen, positief te kaderen. En om binnen 50 jaar nog eens goed te lachen...
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