100 books like Progress

Most books about the future are real bummers. Climate change, war, inequality... the problems seem insurmountable. This book helped me get past those feelings. Yes, we’ve royally screwed things up, but in lyrical prose Ackerman shows us that while it was our ingenuity that led us to screw up the environment, it’s also our ingenuity that can fix it, if we accept the challenge and responsibility. “We can become Earth-restorers,” she claims, “and Earth-guardians.” I like that. 

We have a lot of climate anxiety.

Most of the time I feel optimistic and believe in humanity, believe that we will come together to create a solution, but some days, it can be hard to move past the fear and uncertainty. Climate books can make this worse with their ultimatum-type messaging; of course, we feel doomed.

The Future We Choose is the ideal book to read when you are struggling to see a way forward. Christiana and Tom do a wonderful job of explaining what life could look like in 50 years if we make the right choices now. Rather than the book only being about what is at stake, they paint a clear picture of how much more vibrant, stunning, fulfilling, and joyful our home can be.

This book gave me hope and I lean on the imagery from it in moments I am struggling.

I love this book on many levels. Utopia is always just out of reach but with the scale of time, one could argue that we’re currently living in a utopia.

Even if we don’t have flying cars, more people have opportunities and access to resources than ever before in recorded history.

This book is for optimists and pessimists alike, as the author does a great job addressing the current issues we face and outlining a future worth building. A future of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and no national borders, where opportunities are shared more equitably.

If everyone read this book I know we’d be one step closer to reaching utopia.

There is little time to read and so I prefer short, pithy books. In this one, Horgan examines the various theories of war, finding most of them wanting. Reducing inequality, improving food production, and providing security all help reduce violence, but there is, he concludes, no single, magic cure. Instead, we have to work, hard, smart, and tirelessly, to create non-violent means to resolve disputes and punish trespassers. “If we want peace badly enough, we can have it…”

This book is one of the nuttiest I’ve read in its imaginings of a modern world on steroids. The part that teases most is that its predictions might come true.

I know our smartphones and laptops have changed our world, but cures that would extend longevity ad infinitum? Neural interfaces that would connect us directly to the internet? Nanobots that would reduce the cost of goods to zero?

Because the topic of modernity has come to engross me so, the big question always is, “How far will it carry us?” The answer to which (according to Kurzweil) is much farther than you can possibly imagine and much sooner than you think. One should have one’s mind blown every couple of years, and Kurzweil does exactly that.

Just when I thought the future was bright and sunny (in part due to Kurzweil), I learn from James Barrat that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) might well mark the end of our species (and the start of an ever-expanding artificial replacement).

I was fascinated by the people Barrat introduces us to like an expert on the psychology of ASI, and his description of a perfect machine and its runaway implications. I realized this is modernity at its best and worst: we push forward to improve the world but are always at the risk of creating new, unseen problems.

The most troubling question of all (to my way of thinking) is that our idea of perfected humanity (both a modern and a pre-modern aim) ends in the vision of machines like Watson playing endless games of Jeopardy among themselves.

I loved this book because it ties in with an obsession of mine, the interface between modernity and the past.

It is the autobiography of Edmund Gosse, who grew up with strict, devout parents (even by mid-19th-century standards). However, the father was a biologist just at the time Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. I was intrigued by Gosse’s growing awareness that his parents’ worldview was so out of sync with the times, just as I was fascinated by the father’s anguish as his faith pulled him one way and his reason another.

Gosse’s description of the passing of a world is so entrancing (even from today’s perspective), yet the closeness (and neurosis) of family bonds is endearingly the same.

This book so impressed me because it highlights how pressing the Dreyfus scandal was. I was especially drawn in because, while Harris knows this is a tale of anti-Semitism (and a harbinger of the Holocaust), she also elicits its distinctly modern aspects.

I was amazed to discover how Dreyfus was a polarizing figure not just because he was Jewish but because the acceptance of a Jew into the ranks of society struck many Frenchmen as a sign of how much their world was being overturned.

My suspicions about modernity were confirmed: it doesn’t merely advance our technology but affects every facet of society at once: our fashions, economy, politics, and morals (usually for the better). The book is also a great history (something else that I love).

I like to look at the big picture. This book’s picture is huge: it explains three waves of human civilization, from agriculture and land ownership, to centralization and mass manufacturing, to distributed and custom everything—the wave we are in now. It was originally published in 1980 and predicted our current culture and technology with astonishing accuracy. I, and many entrepreneurs of the time, tried to use those predictions to guide our businesses, and many, like Amazon, succeeded as a result. Are there still more third wave things to invent? Yes—think of how streaming video channels are just now taking over from cable and broadcast, not to mention movie theatres. Will this help you invent the next big thing? Maybe. And what will the fourth wave be?

I remember first reading Future Shock after buying a battered, orange-coloured paperback edition at a bargain price from one of the second-hand bookshops that once saturated London’s Charing Cross Road.

It hadn’t really occurred to me before how much the increasingly rapid technological changes around us might create a sense of shock—‘future shock’— for some people. It changed my thinking about the influence of technology on our world and the impact it has on people, society, economics, and politics.

Even after all these years, many of Alvin Toffler’s insights and ideas remain just as topical today.