Future Politics

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought, and the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093. Dramatizing science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, The Collapse of Western Civilization reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do, providing a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate-change literature.

Why is your CEO boosting stock prices instead of creating real jobs? Why do politicians get rich so fast without being expert investors? Powerful forces shape our lives while the media stays silent. But together, we can change the rules and return power to the people. The middle class is shrinking, reason is being silenced, and the elite keep us distracted and divided. We've given up control—it’s time to take it back.

The Problem with Solutions combines an analysis of the rise of tech company solution culture with findings from actual research on the sector's ill-informed attempts to address the problems of food and agriculture.

Through the eyes of two frontline journalists comes a gripping narrative history of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement centered around a cast of core activists, culminating in the 2019 mass protests and Beijing's brutal crackdown. Hong Kong was an experiment in governance. Handed back to...

Former physicist Andrew Maynard threads together his love of science-fiction movies with his expertise on emerging technologies to engage, entertain, and make you think about the relationship between technology and society. Through the imagination and creativity of science-fiction movies, Maynard introduces listeners to the profound capabilities presented by new and emerging technologies, and the complex personal and societal challenges they present.

Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its "wokeness." In Coming Clean, Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left's own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century.

In this volume of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, Nick Montfort argues that the future is something to be made, not predicted. Montfort offers what he considers essential knowledge about the future, as seen in the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers (mainly in Western culture) who developed and described the core components of the futures they envisioned. Montfort's approach is not that of futurology or scenario planning; instead, he reports on the work of making the future - the thinkers who devoted themselves to writing pages in the unwritten book.

Build a more equitable world for your daughter. Today’s generation of feminist dads are raising confident, empowered daughters who believe they can achieve anything. But the world is still profoundly unequal for women and girls, with workplaces built by men for men, massive gender pay gaps, and deeply ingrained gender stereotypes. Dads for Daughters: How Fathers Can Give Their Daughters a Better, Brighter, Fairer Future offers fathers guidance for building a world where their daughters can thrive.

Physical infrastructure in the United States is crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers has, in its latest report, given American roads and bridges a grade of D and C+, respectively, and has described roughly 65,000 bridges in the United States as 'structurally deficient'. This crisis - and one need look no further than the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota to see that it is indeed a crisis - shows little sign of abating short of a massive change in attitude amongst politicians and the American public.

In AI for Good: Applications in Sustainability, Humanitarian Action, and Health, a team of veteran Microsoft AI researchers delivers an insightful and fascinating discussion of how one of the world's most recognizable software companies is tackling intractable social problems with the power of artificial intelligence (AI). In the book, you'll see real in-the-field examples of researchers using AI with replicable methods and reusable AI code to inspire your own uses.

David Rowan travels the globe in search of the most exciting and pioneering start-ups building the future. He’s got to know the founders of WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Google, Spotify, Xiaomi, Didi, Nest, Twitter and countless other ambitious entrepreneurs disrupting businesses in almost every sector. And yet too often the companies they’re disrupting don’t get it. They think they can innovate through jargon: with talk of change agents and co-creation gurus, ideas portals and webinars, make-a-thons and hackfests, paradigm shifts and pilgrimages to Silicon Valley.

From former assistant secretary of state Kurt M. Campbell comes the definitive analysis and explanation of the new major shift in American foreign policy, its interests and assets, to Asia. There is a quiet drama playing out in American foreign policy far from the dark contours of upheaval in...

The most elite levels of the CIA's Counterintelligence unit are on the verge of pulling off an operation so huge it will change global politics—and so secret that it has no paper trail. But the operation's organizer, Roger Wanamaker, has evidence that the plan has sprung a leak. Now it is a deadly race against time to "walk back the cat"—isolate the leak and plug it—before the scheme is exposed and an international conflict is ignited.

The widening wealth gap is all too familiar to many Millennials and GenZers, especially when home ownership and the lack of debt seem like faraway fantasies. And it's no surprise when they only hold about 4.6% of the country's wealth while Boomers held 22% at around the same age. So what happened to the promise of the American Dream? In this entry of his celebrated Hidden History series, Thom Hartmann uncovers the rise of the American middle class through the progressive policies of FDR, through to its downfall with the increasing privatization and economic deregulations of the Reagan era.

Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson's mission to bring together the fight against climate change and the global struggle for human rights has taken her all over the world. It also brought her to a heartening revelation: that that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself.

Our ability to think about the future is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. In The Invention of Tomorrow, cognitive scientists Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, and Adam Bulley argue that its emergence transformed humans from unremarkable primates to creatures that hold the destiny of the planet in their hands. Drawing on their own cutting-edge research, the authors break down the science of foresight, showing us where it comes from, how it works, and how it made our world.

The Future of the American Family - An Unprecedented Crisis explores the events that have molded the very idea of family. From the Iron Age to the Enlightenment, from the Industrial Revolution to social media, the family has been subject to storm and squaller as it adapts and struggles to find itself in these modern times.

Steven A. Cook charts the course of the United States' encounter with the Middle East from the mid-twentieth century through the present day. Looking back, Cook makes a bold claim: the US was—despite setbacks and moral costs—successful. That record of achievement began to unravel in the early 1990s when policymakers embarked upon a set of overly ambitious policies to remake the Middle East. Cook highlights that calls to withdraw from the region are rash given the important interests the US maintains in the region.

Wir müssen handeln – und wir können es auch! Zarah Bruhn wagt den mutigen Blick nach vorn und zeigt aus ihrer Erfahrung heraus konkrete Wege in die Welt von morgen auf. Sie macht sichtbar, wie viele Menschen bereits heute an der Lösung unserer gesellschaftlichen und ökologischen Herausforderungen arbeiten, und berichtet von ihren Begegnungen: vom Friedensnobelpreisträger bis zur CEO eines Dax-Unternehmens, von der genialen Superhackerin bis zu visionären Sozialarbeitern aus aller Welt. Sie haben Antworten. Sie sind innovativ. Sie sparen dem Staatshaushalt Milliarden.

In fifty compelling essays, including entries on mega-tsunamis, a new ice-age, a giant meteor strike, nuclear holocaust and nanotechnology running amok, Doomsday depicts the possible scenarios of annihilation to come and assesses our chances of survival, if any.