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Overview
Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.
Synopsis
Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.Editorials
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.
—Jim Hahn