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This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future (Edge Question Series) Paperback – December 22, 2009

by John Brockman (Author)

4.4 66 ratings

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“This Will Change Everything offers seemingly radical but actually feasible ideas with the potential to change the world.”—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

Editor John Brockman continues in the same vein as his popular compilations What Are You Optimistic About and What Have You Changed Your Mind About with This Will Change Everything. Brockman asks 150 intellectual superstars “what game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” Their fascinating responses are collected here, from bestselling author of Atonement Ian McEwan to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek to electronic music pioneer Brian Eno to writer, actor, director, and activist Alan Alda.

Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publication date

December 22, 2009
Dimensions

5.31 x 0.94 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9780061899676
ISBN-13

978-0061899676
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Part of a series stemming from his online science journal Edge (www.edge.com), including What Have You Changed Your Mind About? and What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, author and editor Brockman presents 136 answers to the question, "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" Milan architect Stefano Boeri responds with a single sentence: "Discovering that someone from the future has already come to visit us." Most others take the question more seriously; J. Craig Venter believes his laboratory will use "digitized genetic information" to direct organisms in creating biofuels and recycling carbon dioxide. Like biofuels, several topics are recurrent: both Robert Shapiro and Douglas Rushikoff consider discovering a "Separate Origin for Life," a terrestrial unicellular organism that doesn't belong to our tree of life; Leo M. Chalupa and Alison Gopnik both consider the possibility resetting the adult brain's plasticity-its capacity for learning-to childhood levels. Futurologist Juan Enriquez believes that reengineering body parts and the brain will lead to "human speciation" unseen for hundreds of thousands of years, while controversial atheist Richard Dawkins suggests that reverse-engineering evolution could create a highly illuminating "continuum between every species and every other." Full of ideas wild (neurocosmetics, "resizing ourselves," "intuiting in six dimensions") and more close-to-home ("Basketball and Science Camps," solar technology"), this volume offers dozens of ingenious ways to think about progress.

From Booklist

Brockman asked about 130 scientists and several artists the following question: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? Their two- to three-page prognostications bid farewell to the present while disagreeing on the mode of change. Several respondents espy catastrophes such as nuclear war or global warming, but the majority tell readers to expect a fundamental alteration in the human species. This group predicts that a stupendous expansion in computational capacity allied to genomic engineering will transform the human body, brain included, such that one writer suggests the end of Homo sapiens and its succession by Homo evolutis. Pending that apocalyptic development, other scientists nevertheless agree that burgeoning data processing speeds presage a revolution. Some find it in the transmission of knowledge that will profoundly affect education; others, in lifestyle changes such as a preference for robots as pets. Whether their predictions are alarming or reassuring, most names in this volume will be recognized by the futurology audience, who will reach for Brockman’s book on sight. --Gilbert Taylor

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial (December 22, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780061899676
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061899676
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.94 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,834,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,207 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #7,521 in Biology (Books)
- #89,611 in Social Sciences (Books)

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4.4 66 ratings

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N. Stratford

Should be mandatory reading for politicians, esp at budget time, so they spend our money on these ideas

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2017

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A remarkable collection of the views of thinkers; I don't know whether the book gave me hope because there are bright, educated people out there thinking, thinking, thinking, or despair because many of the ideas posited in 2009 have yet to be realised. Either way, it's worth reading and should be compulsory for all politicians, so they see what might be done, were resources appropriately directed. One small criticism, raised by my sister to whom I gave a copy of this book ... too few women commentators. A wee bit of gender balance would have been appreciated. There are many, many women working in STEM professions and they are grossly under-represented here. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, will read it again and again, and will follow some paths opened by it using the bibliography to visit websites, blogs and other books.

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Terrence C. Watson

Listen in on some of the most interesting intelligent discussions

Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2013

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This is not a normal book. It is a collection of responses to a question - in this case, "What will change everything" by many of the best thinkers of our time. The theme is the question; the answers vary from a short paragraph to a chapter by smart people talking to smart people across fields of specialty and interest. You will recognize many of the names but certainly not all, or at least I didn't. You will likely agree with some but not all.

Another little bonus here is that each response stands all by itself. You don't have to follow the long development of an argument; you can drop in on the discussion when convenient for you without a time commitment. I find it worked especially well as Kindle book on my Kindle and my phone.

I immediately bought another book of this series when I finished this one.

One person found this helpful

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Iveta Kazoka

insightful, if you've not been reading any texts on the subject previously

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2012

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It is not easy to pinpoint exactly what has gone wrong in this book, but it seems that it has to do with too large of a question that has been explored to death in futuristic, sci-fi, popular science literature. A similar book with a more narrow question "what scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?" (This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking) brought out more original, rarely-heard-before content.

It is not to say that the essays in the book are bad. Not at all. The problem is that almost all of them seem like nothing new. For example, here is a very perceptive and interesting idea by Nick Bostrom, but would you say you've never heard it before?

"We can increase humanity's joint problem-solving capacity by creating more people or by integrating a greater fraction of the world's existing population into productive endeavors, and we can develop better tools for communication and collaboration, various Internet applications being recent examples. Each of these ways of enhancing individual and collective human intelligence holds great promise. I think they ought to be vigorously pursued. Perhaps the smartest and wisest thing the human species could do would be to work on making itself smarter and wiser. In the longer run, however, biological human brains might cease to be the predominant nexus of Earthly intelligence. Machines will have several advantages, most obviously, faster processing speed: an artificial neuron can operate a million times faster than its biological counterpart. Machine intelligences may also have superior computational architectures and learning algorithms."

If you haven't, then definitely buy this book! It will be of much interest to you. If you have, then let's go on searching for new horizons

One person found this helpful

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James D. Michels

Very Mixed Bag of Essays - Excellent Resouce

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2010

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This book is an absolute treasure, not as a work of literature, but as an introduction to great minds.

The book is a collection of very diverse short essays of varying quality and substance. Most of them I would put into these categories. (strictly my perspective of course)
- Valuable short summaries of technology with expected advances
- Insider ideas of the practical impact of advances in science
- Insightful synthesis of the intersection of two or more areas
- Philosophical musings
- Ridiculous academic liberal blather about nothing
- Pipe Dreams and silliness

Probably at least half of the book is great material and the other part ranges from mediocre to pure garbage. I still give the book 4 stars because there is substantial value in it.

The value that I find is in supplementing my reading list for the next year+. Each of the essays gives us a peek into the work and the writing of one person, many of whom I had never heard of before. I have over a dozen names of people that I consider worth researching for future reading.

The topics include alien life, black holes, designer children, robotics, mind control, space travel, life extension and much, much more. It is hard to think of a good topic that was not included.

In one of the worst essays of the book, a moron who will not be named, gushes on and on about the possibility of dumping some yet to be developed chemical into all the worlds waters in order to chemically neuter humans so that they are incapable of having a mean or violent thought. And if the chemical cannot be developed, implanting electronics in the brains of every human on the planet that does the same thing. In the only glimmer of intelligence in this essay the author does acknowledge that anyone who escaped the authors totalitarian vision would be extremely powerful and dangerous and that the now neutered population would be unable to stop them. Ultimate police state in my view.

Still, one of the most fun books I have read in years.

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Dean P. D'souza

fun and informative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 7, 2015

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These books are fun and informative.

Suresh Walter Heilmann

This will change the world

Reviewed in Germany on February 12, 2010

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Bei dem Kaliber der teilnehmenden Autoren habe ich mir spannenderes erwartet. Manche Ideen haben einen überraschenden Blickwinkel, das meiste was ich (an)gelesen habe, fand ich ziemlich...gähn. Deswegen liegt das Buch inzwischen auch bei mir herum, andere Bücher haben Priorität.

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M Hadi

Nice one

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2016

Verified Purchase

Amazing

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