Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World

Discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades and their implications.

Jim Hahn - Library Journal

Friedman's (law, Santa Clara Univ.) writing is extremely lucid and inventive, just the combination necessary to present the crucial challenges that the U.S. legal system will be faced with by technological revolutions of the future. He offers an overview of privacy architecture and possible futures for cybercommerce, progressing to biological technologies, including cryogenics and nanotechnologies, to bring readers to examine all that for which our legal system is unprepared. Though Friedman's thesis here is solely to present probable adjustments to legal systems to adapt to future revolutionary technology, the revolutions have not yet occurred, and contemporary artificial intelligence researchers will come to differing conclusions about the implications of their work; it will be captivating to examine just how many of the possible technological revolutions discussed here do force a re-examining of legal codes, much as crimes upon networked computer systems already have. Nontech specialists, those with an interest in science fiction, and lay readers can all walk away from this book wiser for the future. Suitable for public libraries as well as law libraries.

David D. Friedman is Professor of Law at Santa Clara University, California. After receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of Chicago, he switched fields to economics and taught at Virginia Polytechnic University, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Los Angeles, Tulane University, the University of Chicago, and Santa Clara University. A professional interest in the economics of law led to positions at the law schools of the University of Chicago and Cornell and thereafter to his present position, where he developed the course on legal issues of the twenty-first century, which led to his writing Future Imperfect. Professor Friedman's first book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, was published in 1973, remains in print, and is considered a libertarian classic. He wrote Price Theory: An Intermediate Text (1986), Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (1996), and Law's Order: An Economic Account (2000). His first work of fiction, Harald, was published in
2006. Professor Friedman's scientific interest in the future is longstanding. The Cypherpunks, an online group responsible for much early thinking about the implications of encryption, included The Machinery of Freedom on their list of recommended readings. Professor Friedman's web page, davidfriedman.com, averages over 3,000 visitors a day and his blog, Ideas, at daviddfriedman.blogspot.com receives about 400 daily visits.