Customer Reviews

The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today: 60 Of The World's Greatest Minds Share Their Visions of the Next Half-Century

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The list of personalities who contribute to this book is impressive, including several Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Medicine, Chemistry , Economics and Peace.
The most clear-sighted say that the future is essentially unpredictable ("the hallmark of science has been unanticipated great leaps"), but there are two main conclusions: we need a new political leadership ( "there is a lack of vision in global affairs", something more acute in the US, of course) and they and we need to take care of some major problems: energy, water and food supplies, climate change, demography, health problems (obesity and its derivatives being a prominent one).
Then, there are a few somewhat surprising statements:
-Most mental illnesses will be proven to be of microbial origin (transmitted by animals)
-People will live over 140 years of quality life
-AIDS will be fought with an anti-HIV virus
-We will know the exact positions and velocities of a 100 billion galaxies
-We will have clones (but they will be distinct from us)
-In order that in 2058 all humans enjoy the standards of living enjoyed now by the West you need to build one Gigawatt power plant every single day for 40 years
-We will recreate life in the laboratory
-There will be intelligent self-programmable machines that will evolve much faster than us so we will be forced to become hybrids (cyborgs)
-There will be methods to convert CO2 directly to useful fuels
-In the future medicine will be predictive, personalized, preemptive and participatory
-We will download 3D blueprints and simple solid products will be nanoassembled at home
-A lot of people will spend a lot of time immersed in virtual reality (Second Life Plus)
-Neurological and psychiatric illnesses will be cured
-Replacing organs grown from our stem cells will be routine
-Driving to work will be mostly a thing of the past (telecommuting)
Optimistic forecasts:
-Science is going to kill the soul stone dead (Dawkins)
-We will understand subjective consciousness (also Dawkins, this might be more realistic), but others doubt it ("I doubt that the code of consciousness will be cracked")
-We will recreate life in the laboratory
-Intelligent extraterrestrials will be discovered in the next 100 years
And pessimistic forecasts:
-Pandemics
-Bio and nuclear terrorism
-Christian and Islamic fundamentalism could bring us to a Dark Age (we could lose our way as it happened when the library in Alexandria was destroyed)
-Crowded cities will be jungles of crime
And outlandish forecasts:
-Flying cars
-Flying shoes
-A global network of maglevs
-California will be a nation
And some nasty facts:
-Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 100 years
-42% of Americans over 85 have Alzheimer's disease
-If you stay in a hospital you have a 15% chance of getting an infection
Reminders of sensible principles:
-Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will
Finally:
The XXIst century technologies will be: information technology, life sciences, nanotechnology and neurotechnology.

I like to hear from people who are moving us ahead in areas I know little about. Their titles don't necessarily impress me, but their brains do. Genetics, pharmacology, bioethics, international police organizations, physics, these are all things I don't normally think much about. It is both fascinating and scary to hear what they have to say about the future. I hope we can deal with it.

It was pleasant and comforting to read the views of my favorite scientific personalities. It was at the same time rewarding and entertaining. The topics may have been serious but the reading was simple, fluid and easy.

When I happened upon "50 Years From Today" I had the idea that after reading this book I might come away with a pretty realistic view of what our world might look like in the year 2058. However, after reading all 60 essays offered by those purported to be leading thinkers in a whole host of disciplines I find that I have no better understanding of what the future holds in store than I did before reading this book. I found a few of these essays to be somewhat interesting but for the most part I thought that the writing in this book was pretty tedious. While I realize that trying to predict the future is pretty risky business I felt that this book really seemed to miss the mark. I thought that the approach to this project was generally unfocused. It seems to me that the participants were given few guidelines to follow and the result was rather chaotic in my view. I think that "50 Years From Now" would have worked so much better had each writer been responding to a set of general questions. It would have been interesting to compare and contrast the responses. Maybe it's just me but I did not learn a whole lot or gain many insights from this one. Not recommended.

As I read one dull chapter after the next, all I could think was that with all these great minds, all this talent, there wasn't much to show for it. I bought this book without opening the cover, which turns out to be a mistake. This isn't much here that's surprising or insightful and actually most of the chapters are boring.

Highlights:

By 2050, nine-billion or more humans will walk the earth.

Modest space colonies will exist.

China will rise to such heights that Chinese will be the next global language, ahead of English and Spanish.

Developments in medicine will bring such revolutions in surgery, bionics, cloning, stem cell research, that many diseases of today will be controlled or altogether eradicated by mid-century.

Climate changes could wreak havoc to coastlines and farm belts.

Robots may not be as great a presence as science fiction has lead us to believe.

The racial composition of the western world will be not unlike that of present-day Brazil, with multi-ethnic societies being the norm.

Fuels sources will be a mix of what we presently term "green" and also we will have a greater reliance on nuclear power than is commonplace today.

Massive extinctions will continue among species alive today, with birds being particularly hard hit.

Overall after reading this book, wherein each chapter was like a little monument to its author's ego, I am happy here in the present, and am in no big hurry to greet the world into which I'll grow old.

When I was a little kid, "50 years from now" predictions meant huge highways with electrical grids with one person car-pods buzzing around on them, plus jet propelled shoes that vaulted the wearer far above the huge convuluted highways that wrapped around our stratosphere-piercing skyscrapers. People wore skin-tight form-fitting outfits and strange headgear.

Well, OK - I HAVE seen the last two items at some of the parties I've gone to, but the majority of the "50 Years From Now" stuff predicted in the 1950's remains nothing but a collection of colorful illustrations in a scientific magazine, or comic book.

"The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today" impresses me in places -- SOME of the predictions are quite pragmatic and telling, such as:

Jody Williams' brilliant four pager stating that we need to concentrate on "People-Centered Security rather than the traditional state-centric notion that has shaped thinking for centuries"

and Wanda Jones, in her no-nonsense warning about "The major health consequences of obesity" -- "arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, and cancers" and "diabetes" (already) "increasing among children and adults a decade ago" (1998)

John R. Christy's sensitive, diplomatic, empowering and highly interesting acknowledgement of the goodness inherent in human nature and the ability of everyone to choose to better the world, in whatever shape it turns out to be 50 years from now.

Then there are those essays stating that we will no longer need schools for our children because they will be given Wisdom Pills, or that working stiffs will be fined for taking an extra cognitive enhancer to get them thru their abbreviated work day. To me, these essays were more like works of science fiction.

E Fuller Torrey's article stating that "Dogs will commonly be kept as pets, but keeping cats, hamsters birds and other animals will be uncommon because of the known infectious agents they carry" -- did not impress me in the least. You don't have to be a scientist to understand the germy implications of following scenario -- 1) Dog drinks out of toilet, or eats Cat Tootsie Rolls 2) Dog goes over and licks owner on the lips. As for cats and Birds -- for hundreds of years, sea-faring humans have shipped Bird guano (30 tons or more of it, reeking and festering in the humid wooden ships' holds) on ocean voyages lasting for many weeks or months -- they survived, thanks to Ma Nature's good old Immune System. And as for cats -- if cats were THAT germy, then my family would be extinct by now, and I would not have had the same (healthy) veterinarian for the past 16 years.

Anyway, I digress.

In conclusion, this book "The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today" is a mix of commonsense prognostication, Comic Relief, Science Fiction, Page Fillers, but -- in many cases, IS thought-provoking.

This fascinating book offers the forecasts of 60 leaders about what our lives will be like in 2050. The ideas of people of science, conservation, computers, medicine, technology, and more will give you much to think about.

If you're looking for a book to tell you the answers or create a science fiction visualization, this book is not the one you want. If you're looking for a book that will tease your brain, scare the heck out of you, and make you realize that YOU have to take responsibility for the future, then you'll love this book.

Brain scientist Richard Restak believes that 40 years from now we will be concerned about the ethics of using "technology to stimulate healthy mental states in as many people as possible in the interest of creating a more harmonious society" (p. 76).

Former security and terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke believes that in the future, "People will have so many computers in their bodies and such connectivity to networks with AI [artificial intelligence] systems that there will be questions about where the line is between humans and machines" (p. 72).

Some of the authors are quite creative in their ideas and the way they write about them. You'll find insights into some interesting scholarship and research. You will find much to contemplate from cultural, societal, ethical, and individual perspectives. The brief and diverse perspectives will help you figure out what you want to see in your future.

I found the book very interesting and enjoyable; each essay was like a short story, and a pleasure to read. Some were optimistic and some were sobering and scary. Some seemed quite possible base on events of today, we shall see. I am looking forward to my 100th birthday in 2058. I liked the book all the work was well written.

I teach a college course on Technology and Society and it provides many things to think about. It DOES NOT tell you what to expect fifty years from now. Predicting the future five years out is impossible. With computers and years of records we can't predict the weather past 24 hours out, and even that is often incorrect. No one predicted the rise of cell phones or mp3 players - even their inventors. Don't expect concrete answers - just things we should help our world to work towards.

Another reviewer said it best: one boring chapter after another. It's like a very glib summary of what even children know: global warming is a threat, computers are getting smarter, and, medicine is getting better.

But don't expect any in depth discussion about any of this. It's mere tea room talk. Each chapter (60 of them), is an average of 3-4 pages each. Obviously the authors can only very briefly say what they think the world will be like 50 years from now. In this way, I don't necessarily blame the authors, but the person responsible for the book's format. Since Mike Wallace's smug face is staring at me from the cover, I'll blame him.

In fact, a guy like Mike Wallace on the cover... that should be a dead give away to avoid this book.