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This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future |  | Author: John Brockman
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $14.99
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Seller: daystar-books
Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 22315
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0061899674
Dewey Decimal Number: 303
EAN: 9780061899676
ASIN: 0061899674
Publication Date: January 1, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to more than 100 of the world's most influential minds. Exhilarating, visionary, sometimes frightening, but always fascinating, their responses provide an eye-opening road map of our near future.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A mixed bag of essays, stronger than last year's collection January 6, 2010
Robert C. Ross (New Jersey)
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
The Edge Foundation is an organization of science and technology intellectuals created "to seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have themselves ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Its main activity is maintaining its free website and circulating free regular emails about the contributions of its stable of intellectuals.
Once a year Edge publishes a collection of essays devoted to a single question; the 2009 question was devoted to issues that the contributors believe will shape the future. Amazon has provided the excellent table of contents which describes in some detail the answers of all of the contributors.
It is almost impossible (and unfair to the fine essays not sampled) to provide a meaningful review of so many essays, but it is great fun to read through the contents, and then search out more information from authors of interest, either in the book itself or in other resources. (Google does a great job of providing more information by entering the author's name and a few of the words from the Table of Contents.) I found the Kindle version particularly interesting, especially the iPhone version; it's fun to dip into the collection in odd moments, and then follow the links or use Google to find additional information.
Michael Bond in "The New Scientist" describes the contents well: "Some ideas are predictable (immortality, intelligent robots, designer children), some world-saving if they happened (oil we can grow) and some we'd be better off without (neuro-cosmetics). Many are self-indulgent technological fantasies. With [130 contributions] the book is like an intellectual lucky dip. Perfect for: anyone who wants to know what the big thinkers will be chewing on in 2010."
Edge's home page has a wonderful selection of extracts from the book, including some offbeat pictures of some of the contributors, and some additional information and videos that add complexity to the collection.
The specific question this year is "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" You might find it fun to jot down a couple of your own ideas before browsing through the treasures here. You may just run into one of them in these pages.
Robert C. Ross 2010
Critical Inspiration December 27, 2009
W. Saumweber (Northern California, USA)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
If you are interested in what some of our foremost scientists and researchers are thinking, and how they see our future, buy this book. The editor(s) have done a marvelous job putting this selection of short essays together enabling an interested layperson to get on overview of the widely varying approaches to understanding what our future holds - and what makes us and our world "tick." These essays present a balanced collection of optimistic and pessimistic voices. Critical inspiration for the rest of us. A must read!
Brain Candy January 8, 2010
David Larson (Philadelhpia, PA)
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
I love this whole series of Edge book. Reading each essay is like reaching into a chocolate box of intellectual stimulation.
 Short but sweet February 14, 2010
GAC (Chicago, IL USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a nice read that can be read in no particular order since it is composed of very short essays. If you're like me and have a short attention span with books but are interested in the ideas and opinons of others who are experts in their fields, then this is the book for you. All of the opinions are no more than a few pages each. That gives room in the book to talk about a wide variety of interesting topics.
Very Mixed Bag of Essays - Excellent Resouce April 8, 2010
James D. Michels (Zurich, Switzerland)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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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