Showing results for "World Politics" in Future Studies

What will planet Earth be like in 20 years? At mid-century? In the year 2100? Prescient and convincing, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future. Never has the world offered more promise for the future and been more fraught with dangers. In this powerful and sometimes terrifying work, Attali analyzes the past and pinpoints nine distinct periods of human history, each with its world center of power and prestige, and predicts what the tenth will bring by the end of this century.

Lee, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than fifty years on the world stage. Almost single-handedly responsible for transforming Singapore into a Western-style economic success, he offers a unique perspective on the geopolitics of East and West. American presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama have welcomed him to the White House.

According to even the most conservative estimates, China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy by 2027 and will ascend to the position of world economic leader by 2050. But the full repercussions of China's ascendancy-for itself and the rest of the globe-have been surprisingly little explained or understood.

What will the world look like in 2050? How will complex forces of change—demography, the environment, finance, technology and ideas about governance—affect our global society? And how, with so many unknowns, should we think about the future? One of Europe’s foremost voices on global trends in economics, business and society, Hamish McRae takes us on an exhilarating journey through the next 30 years. Drawing on decades of research, and combining economic judgement with historical perspective, Hamish weighs up the opportunities and dangers we face.

The Future of War - which covers civil wars to as yet unknown nuclear conflicts, proxy wars (real) to the Cold War (not), fashionably small wars to the War to End All Wars (it didn't) - is filled with insight and fascinating nuggets of military history and culture from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.

In the near future, wars will be fought not over land, but over data. Machines will quickly discover individualized treatments for diseases, and with the help of virtual reality, AI will inspect buildings that have not yet been built. With the rising interest in these technologies by both China and the US, who will emerge as the victor of this technological race? When AI Rules the World is an investigation and call to action into AI technologies for a nation that does not yet comprehend the full gravity of the AI revolution.

There are an infinite number of possible futures that lie ahead of us—like threads stretching out into the distance. Rob Hopkins, cofounder of the international Transition Network movement, invites us to travel to future worlds we would actually want to live in.

Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this postcapitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism might actually entail.

For fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, a book about facing the multiple crises of modernity--and hospicing modernity--with maturity, humility, and integrity. This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow...

Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.

A pioneering exploration of four cities where East meets West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?

World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–1938. Throughout the book, Wells describes his vision of the World Brain: a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent “World Encyclopedia” that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace.

Dive into the most comprehensive projection of Russia’s population and ethnic landscape by the year 2070. This meticulous analysis goes far beyond national totals, providing granular, region-by-region estimates for every Oblast, Okrug, and Autonomous Region.

Born into the Christian minority in Lebanon and since settled in France, Amin Maalouf claims a unique position in global conversation. His first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, was a critical and commercial success and remains in print after 20 years. In Disordered World, Maalouf combines his command of history with a critical perspective on contemporary culture, East and West - joining them with a fierce moral clarity and a propulsive style.

Talibanic enforcers burning books? The Supreme Court deciding that sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state"? The Hollywood Left embracing polygamy? If you think these things can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious and provocative columnist Mark Steyn shows to devastating effect in this, his first book on American and global politics.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political.

The industrial age made possible by fossil fuels will surely decline as these fuels run out. In The Ecotechnic Future John Michael Greer alerts the listener to possible changes future generations may face as these dwindling fuel supplies lead first to a deindustrial age, then to a society which salvages the remnants of our current plenty, and eventually to a time in which people may learn to live in balance with the environment: an ecotechnic society.

Multi-award-winning scientific futurist Dr. Catherine Ball presents insights into how technology and science are providing answers to many of the challenges the world is facing today—food shortages, war and conflict, the decline in local manufacturing, health and ageing, and global warming—and asks why we are not embracing these technologies more widely. Dr. Catherine opens our eyes to the amazing, wide world of technological advancements and explores the role we all have in learning more, owning the conversations, and determining what we want technology to be.

Life has never been easier thanks to the advancement of technology. However, with all new technological advancements also come new risks. The most drastically increasing issue in the world today is not biological warfare, but cyber warfare. Data has become the single most valuable commodity in today’s world, and, of course, there are always people lurking around the corner, trying to get their hands on it.

We are about to enter a new era when the combination of human and artificial intelligence will bring about a paradigm with a potential unseen before. This book is an invitation to delve into the labyrinth of the mind, to challenge preconceived notions, and to embrace the mysticism of awareness in all of its forms.