The Skeptics' Guide to the Future

I started listening to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast a few months ago. I'd read the book with the same name and thought it was quite useful. So when Dr. Steven Novella and the rest of the podcasters mentioned they'd written a second book called The Skeptics' Guide to the Future: What Yesterday's Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow, I had to (literally) check it out. If you're interested in futurism--as science fiction writers are by definition--then you'll want to do the same.

The book is divided into five parts. The first one is an introduction to futurism, which is the art of predicting the future. It discusses how previous predictions about the future were right or not and looks at general trends. (We tend to overestimate short-term progress and underestimate long-term progress. We also assume the institutions and culture we have today will persist with little or no change.) The other four sections deal with various aspects of technology: current, future, space travel, and science fiction tech. Each part is broken into several chapters, with each chapter focused on a specific type of technology. The authors discuss what types of technology are possible (they cover everything from stem cells to light sabers) and when they might be developed or become feasible. (Some familiarity with the technology is assumed, as this is a general overview, but the authors provide some history and current status for each type of technology.) They also discuss ideas that might not work; unfortunately for my stories Lyon's Legacy and Twinned Universes, we are unlikely to be able to travel to alternate universes through wormholes. The first four parts end with snippets of future fiction set anywhere from a few decades to more than twenty thousand years in the future.

Not surprisingly, the overall message of the book is that technology will continue to become an important part of our culture and change it in ways we might not be able to foresee. The general assumption is that humanity will continue to exist in some form or another; the authors ignore most potential catastrophes with the exception of artificial intelligence turning against us. They do discuss the possibilities of humans using brain-machine interfaces, uploading our minds into computers, or colonizing space. 

This book is worth reading not just if you're interested in science or science fiction, but the future. After all, every new day brings us closer to it.