Björn recenserade The Next Fifty Years av John Brockman
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3 stjärnor
I picked this up with the express purpose of waving it about 35 years from now and yelling in my old man's voice "Where's my [this book's equivalent of a] jetpack?" While it's interesting, I don't think I'll bother.
That the book is over 10 years old and obviously a bit dated (yes, e-books did become a thing; no, AFAIK we still haven't proven that breast cancer is caused by infection) isn't its major problem. Rather, it is that the editor seems to have first decided which authors he wanted to include and only after getting their contributions realising that a lot of them ended up writing about the same issues. So we get a bunch of articles that skirt the same issues (biochemistry, genetics, and Moore's Law in every single chapter) while others that might have been at least as interesting (say, the environment, or energy) are all but …
I picked this up with the express purpose of waving it about 35 years from now and yelling in my old man's voice "Where's my [this book's equivalent of a] jetpack?" While it's interesting, I don't think I'll bother.
That the book is over 10 years old and obviously a bit dated (yes, e-books did become a thing; no, AFAIK we still haven't proven that breast cancer is caused by infection) isn't its major problem. Rather, it is that the editor seems to have first decided which authors he wanted to include and only after getting their contributions realising that a lot of them ended up writing about the same issues. So we get a bunch of articles that skirt the same issues (biochemistry, genetics, and Moore's Law in every single chapter) while others that might have been at least as interesting (say, the environment, or energy) are all but completely absent. Plus, of course, if you want to be pessimistic you could argue that all these things we might achieve over the next half- (or third-) century depends on us not spending that time killing each other and handing political power to people who still think the world is 6,000 years old, and there's nobody here who's not a "pure" scientist willing to look beyond their own field to society at large.
That said, sure, there are some very interesting essays here, promising a few decades of increaing awarness of complexity, leavin us with some very intriguing ethical issues to face (or ignore, if you want Dawkins' opinion).