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Predictions: Thirty Great Minds on the Future (Popular Science)

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Review of Predictions by Sian Griffiths (Editor)

This book would be a great present for any person who has an interest in intellectual thought and ideas. It comprises a brief biography of each one of thirty great thinkers followed by a contribution from them outlining their view of the future for mankind. The biographies, in addition to giving a quick view of the life and times of those distinguished minds, also give a quick summaries of their contribution to modern thought. The explanations of their theories are clear and lucid but at a level which is comprehensible to the lay reader. The ideas are stimulating and a spur to discovering more about some of the theories and inventions of these great men and women. The contributions of the intellectuals themselves point to exciting changes and challenges for humanity in the 21st century. The contributors include, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Umberto Eco, Lyn Margulis, Steven Pinker and 25 others. This is the nicest book I have read for a long time and one I am delighted to own.

When I saw the list of eminent minds that contributed to this volume in the index, I bought the book without further scrutiny. However, I was disappointed by most of the contributions. It seems the experts chose to save their best ideas for their own individual works. I enjoyed Umberto Eco, who always entertains doubts, Chomsky, Galbraith, Singer, Zizek and Dawkins. I found Achebe, Dworkin (particularly annoying), and Amartya sen to be repeating the same politically correct diatribes as always and lacking in real depth. The book is valuable, however, as a guide to seeking further understanding the ideas of the contributors. It provides bibliographies and biographies for each thinker. However, I suggest you look this up as brief refernce and then go out and buy the books from the thinkers you like.

As with other reviewers, I agree that the format of this book results in many of the Great Minds coming across as dull and boring. However, if you treat the book as an introduction to the various authors, then you can use it to gain a list of references to books written by those Great Minds - and I assure you that most of them are far from banal.

"Predictions: Thirty Great Minds on the Future" is easily one of the most reader-friendly, chin-stroking collections of interviews and essays prognosticating time's arrow I've read, and I've read a lot (Tommorow Now, Metatrends, etc.) Nothing is expanded in depth here. It's more about breadth. If you don't necessarily agree with what Richard Dawkins thinks, then read the interview/essay from Lynn Margulis (re: Margulis, Dawkins once said he'd rather share a conference table with Attila the Hun!).

Some of the previous reviewers seem to hold Predictions up to some pre-conceived notion. Well, everyone has pre-conceptions. We don't come to books as tabula rasas. In fact, there's something funny about the person who had trouble with the lack of "God" in this collection. It's like going to St. Peter's Cathedral and complaining you can't find a good postcard. Ie. can't see the forest for the trees. Maybe that's not the best description, but I believe in God, and science, and the ability of deep thinkers to extrapolate upon the present to guide the future, and even intrigue our imaginations and... pre-conceptions. What's life without change?

As Umberto Eco says: "Don't fall in love with your own airship."

Recommended for general science fans, writers looking for good/new ideas, and anyone who wants to learn about the direction we're going in the time it takes to visit the watercloset.

This book's genesis can be traced to a series of profiles of contemporary "great minds" published in "The Times Higher Education Supplement". Someone at Oxford University Press saw an opportunity to recycle 30 of them as a millennium project by adding brief predictions from the profilees about what scholarly breakthroughs they foresee in the 21st century. The 30 predictors are celebrity scholars in various fields of science, social science, mathematics and philosophy. Some are well-known like Noam Chomsky, Stephen J Gould, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur C Clark, while others are moderately obscure like Steven Pinker, Lynn Margulis, Dale Spender, and Amartya Sen. All 30, though, are sufficiently trendy to appear in the mass media's more intellectual venues like C-Span and PBS to promote their latest books or projects. As such, their names and their ideas are a necessary part of the baggage of the well- informed middlebrow. The chief value of the books is as a sort of Cliffnotes for those who don't have the time or inclination to read these authors in the original. The profile summarizes the career and published works of the "great mind" placing him or her in the context of their peers. Thus, in a mere 320 pages one can acquire enough information to appear conversant with the Great Books and Great Thoughts of our day. The predictions, themselves, are pretty pallid stuff. Galbraith hopes (rather than predicts) that the income gap will narrow and that a strengthened UN will "suspend sovereignty in countries whose governments are destroying their people". Arthur C Clark, as one might expect, is the exception, prophesying that artificial intelligence will equal human intelligence within twenty years and that by the end of the 21st century mankind will have developed space propulsion systems that permit near speed-of-light travel. Umberto Eco offers the only memorable epigram when he warns (referring to the parallel development of airships and airplanes) that "in both philosophy and the sciences you must be careful not to fall in love with your own airship".

I am glad that I have this book. Not because I agree with very much of anything in this book or admire the thinking or stature of any of these thirty "great minds". This is such an exercise in arrogance and secularist delusion that it makes a wonderful way to get snapshots of the way such people think. I find much of the book disgusting, some of it laughable, and a bit of it frightening. A couple of the people chosen have useful things to say, but not many.

The format is that the editor spends more space writing a flattering introduction explaining the life work of the "great mind" than the mind gets for expounding what they predict and hope for the new century and millennium. Of course, these kinds of exercises are done each century and they are always embarrassing to look back on. Why? Because they are always an exercise in narcissism. The thinker is so in love with his own worldview that all future good is measured by how it conforms to that view. Isn't that overweening sense of self clearly a manifestation of narcissism (at least solipsism)? But we can take hope in the tendency of the ways in whic the future has ways of confounding the present.

The best advice I have heard about the future came from the economist Herb Stein. He said that if a trend can't continue it won't.

I think that you can get copies of this book for about one penny or not much more. That should tell what the book's future - just five years out - already thinks of their thinking.

First, fill up a page or two with personal comments to show that you are important enough to be allowed an interview with the Great Mind. This leaves only enough room for the predictions of the Great Mind to appear totally banal. And the tragedy is that one really should be interested in what many of these people have to say.

This book is an excellent introduction to the works and thoughts of some of the great minds in the world today--and particularly those that are housed at Oxford and M.I.T. The emphasis is upon human evolution; attempting to unravel the mystery of human consciousness; the human genome project; and, of course, the computer and it's interaction with us, its potential for achieving artificial intellegence, and the implications of the Internet. If your interests lie elsewhere, look elsewhere. In particular, if you happen be of a God-centered mindset, you will be dismayed--as I was--at the scepticism and even antipathy toward God and all things religious that many of these great minds share. In a hard fought fight, the winner of the award for the most offensive statement in this respect goes to molecular biologist James Watson, who reported,"People say we are playing God. My answer is, if we don't play God, who will?"

One hardly needs to be a religous fundamentalist to be disheartened by the attitudes of many of these gifted individuals.

If these are 30 "great minds", then God help the human race.Most of the viewpoints are very narrow, with the thinker projecting his or her specialized ideas into the future.None mention the most important influence taking place today that will shape the future.This is the moral decline occurring due to excessive materialism and commercialism.These factors are causing the collapse of civilization.Nobody likes a Cassandra, but I predict increasing breakdown: of societies and the environment.

This book was sold out. The bookstore did not charge me for the book and, of course, did not send it.