Looks at how technology will shape the next century, and discusses cyborgs, genetic engineering, national defense, economic development, and education.

From Google Books: Glen examines the potential for future integration between man and machine drawing on examples in medicine (the Jarvik heart, Utah arm, Triad hip, etc) and advances in human-like processing via machine in terms of speech recognition and other information technologies. While the author touches on topics ranging from philosophy and religion to science and politics, the unifying theme is what he sees as the inescapable blending of machine-enhanced humans and ‘conscious’ artificial intelligence.

Source: Amazon

Global Governance of the Transition to Artificial General Intelligence: Issues and Requirements
Authored and Edited by Jerome Clayton Glenn

While today’s Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) tools have limited purposes like diagnosing illness or driving a car, if managed well, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), could usher in great advances in human condition encompassing the fields of medicine, education, longevity, turning around global warming, scientific advancements, and creating a more peaceful world. However, if left unbridled, AGI also has the potential to end human civilization. This book discusses the current status, and provides recommendations for the future, regarding regulations concerning the creation, licensing, use, implementation and governance of AGI.

Based on an international assessment of the issues and potential governance approaches for the transition from ANI of today to future forms of AGI by The Millennium Project, a global participatory think tank, the book explores how to manage this global transition. Section 1 shares the views of 55 AGI experts and thought leaders from the US, China, UK, Canada, EU, and Russia, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Bill Gates, on 22 critical questions. In Section 2, The Millennium Project futurist team analyzes these views to create a list of potential regulations and global governance systems or models for the safe emergence of AGI, rated and commented on by an international panel of futurists, diplomats, international lawyers, philosophers, scientists and other experts from 47 countries.

This book broadens and deepens the current conversations about future AI, educating the public as well as those who make decisions and advise others about potential artificial intelligence regulations.

Source: Barnes & Noble

The State of the Future 20.0 is a 500-page broad overview of the issues and opportunities on the future of humanity. It is a detailed and readable look at what we should know today to avoid the worst and achieve the best for humanity.

The Millennium Project, a global participatory think-tank, distilled countless research reports, insights from hundreds of futurists and related experts around the world, and 70 of its own futures research reports, to make this report of immense value.

It offers an Executive Summary and concluding section on the prospects for civilization, plus seven parts. State of the Future’s authors are Jerome Clayton Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, Elizabeth Florescu.

Source: Amazon

Forecasting the future with advanced data models and visualizations.

To envision and create the futures we want, society needs an appropriate understanding of the likely impact of alternative actions. Data models and visualizations offer a way to understand and intelligently manage complex, interlinked systems in science and technology, education, and policymaking. Atlas of Forecasts, from the creator of Atlas of Science and Atlas of Knowledge, shows how we can use data to predict, communicate, and ultimately attain desirable futures.

Using advanced data visualizations to introduce different types of computational models, Atlas of Forecasts demonstrates how models can inform effective decision-making in education, science, technology, and policymaking. The models and maps presented aim to help anyone understand key processes and outcomes of complex systems dynamics, including which human skills are needed in an artificial intelligence–empowered economy; what progress in science and technology is likely to be made; and how policymakers can future-proof regions or nations. This Atlas offers a driver’s seat-perspective for a test-drive of the future.

Source: MIT Press

This book introduces a ‘Big History’ perspective to understand the acceleration of social, technological and economic trends towards a near-term singularity, marking a radical turning point in the evolution of our planet. It traces the emergence of accelerating innovation rates through global history and highlights major historical transformations throughout the evolution of life, humans, and civilization. The authors pursue an interdisciplinary approach, also drawing on concepts from physics and evolutionary biology, to offer potential models of the underlying mechanisms driving this acceleration, along with potential clues on how it might progress.
The contributions gathered here are divided into five parts, the first of which studies historical mega-trends in relation to a variety of aspects including technology, population, energy, and information.

The second part is dedicated to a variety of models that can help understand the potential mechanisms, and support extrapolation. In turn, the third part explores various potential future scenarios, along with the paths and decisions that are required. The fourth part presents philosophical perspectives on the potential deeper meaning and implications of the trend towards singularity, while the fifth and last part discusses the implications of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars from various disciplines interested in historical trends, technological change and evolutionary processes.

Source: Amazon

“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem

“If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.” —Ezra Klein (Vox)

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.

Source: Amazon

We’ve seen the power of the internet to connect people around the world in ways never before known. This remarkable book argues that the billions of messages and pieces of information flying back and forth are linking the minds of humanity together into a single, global brain: a brain with astonishing potential for the Earth.

Peter Russell, an acclaimed author and speaker, weaves together modern technology and ancient mysticism to present a startling vision of the world to come, where humanity is a fully conscious superorganism in an awakening universe. The human potential movement, he shows, is growing fast and influencing business, politics and medicine.

This new edition is fully updated for the challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

Source: Amazon

An argument that we have a moral duty to explore other planets and solar systems—because human life on Earth has an expiration date.

Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, cataclysmic war, or the death of the sun in a few billion years. To avoid extinction, we will have to find a new home planet, perhaps even a new solar system, to inhabit. In this provocative and fascinating book, Christopher Mason argues that we have a moral duty to do just that. As the only species aware that life on Earth has an expiration date, we have a responsibility to act as the shepherd of life-forms—not only for our species but for all species on which we depend and for those still to come (by accidental or designed evolution). Mason argues that the same capacity for ingenuity that has enabled us to build rockets and land on other planets can be applied to redesigning biology so that we can sustainably inhabit those planets. And he lays out a 500-year plan for undertaking the massively ambitious project of reengineering human genetics for life on other worlds.

As they are today, our frail human bodies could never survive travel to another habitable planet. Mason describes the toll that long-term space travel took on astronaut Scott Kelly, who returned from a year on the International Space Station with changes to his blood, bones, and genes. Mason proposes a ten-phase, 500-year program that would engineer the genome so that humans can tolerate the extreme environments of outer space—with the ultimate goal of achieving human settlement of new solar systems. He lays out a roadmap of which solar systems to visit first, and merges biotechnology, philosophy, and genetics to offer an unparalleled vision of the universe to come.

Source: MIT Press