This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future - Paperback

by John Brockman (Author)

"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.

The answers form a brilliant and sometimes startling look at the scientific ideas poised to reshape our world.

• Artificial Intelligence: Will we download our consciousness into computers? Neuroscientist David Eagleman and AI pioneer John Tooby explore the future of the mind.
• Synthetic Biology: Geneticist J. Craig Venter reveals how we will soon write new 'software of life' and what it means to create the first artificial life-form on Earth.
• The Future of Evolution: From Richard Dawkins breaking the species barrier to PZ Myers on what it means to be human, see how our very definition of 'life' is about to change.
• Climate and Energy: Futurist Stewart Brand and novelist Ian McEwan offer surprising takes on everything from the mastery of climate to the full flourishing of solar technology.
• Robotics and The Brain: Explore the 'robotic moment' with MIT's Sherry Turkle and the coming brain-machine interfaces that will redefine our bodies and our world.

Back Jacket

"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.