What are you optimistic about? : today's leading thinkers on why things are good and getting better

What are you optimistic about? : today's leading thinkers on why things are good and getting better / edited by John Brockman.

Book

1st U.S. ed.

New York : Harper Perennial, c2007.

xxii, 374 p. ; 21 cm.

Brockman, John, 1941- Diamond, Jared M.

"With contributions by Jared Diamond ... [et al.]"--Cover. Includes index.

Preface: the annual Edge question
Acknowledgements
Introduction / Daniel C. Dennett
Incredible odds / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Our species can unravel mysteries / Brian Greene
Good choices sometimes prevail / Jared Diamond
The decline of violence / Steven Pinker
War will end / John Horgan
World peace / John McCarthy
We are making moral progress / Sam Harris
The unending stream of bad news is itself flawed / Chris Anderson
Techno-optimism and the energy challenge / Martin Rhees
The divide between scientific thinking and the rest of our culture is decreasing / Carlo Rovelli
The evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion / Daniel C. Dennett
A proper scientific understanding of irrationality (and religion in particular) / Andrew Brown
The final scientific enlightenment / Richard Dawkins
Science and the decline of magic / Michael Shermer
Evidence-based decision making will transform society / J. Craig Venter
Human beings are different from their ancestral species / Douglas Rushkoff
The future of science, religion, and technology / Anton Zeilinger
Going beyond our Darwinian roots / Leonard Suskind
A secular humanist death / Geoffrey Miller
The war between science and religion will see new light / Marcelo Gleiser
The first coming / Martin E.P. Seligman
A new tool leading us toward a deep understanding of human nature / Freeman J. Dyson
Sometime in the 21st century I will understand 20th century physics / Jerry Adler
The future of string theory / Gino Segre
Renewal of science for public good / Lawrence M. Krauss
Strangers in our midst / Robert Shapiro
Physics will not achieve a theory of everything / Frank Wilczek
Bullish on cosmology / Paul Steinhardt
The return of the discipline of experiment will transform our knowledge of fundamental physics / Lee Smolin
People will increasingly value truth (over truthiness) / Lisa Randall
Physics will flourish once more / Charles Seife
The optimism of scientists / Karl Sabbagh
What lies beyond our cosmic horizon / Alexander Vilenkin
We're not insignificant after all / Max Tegmark
Coraggio, domani sara peggio! / George F. Smoot
Progress is surprisingly durable / James O'Donnell
The situational focus / Philip G. Zimbardo
The women of the 110th Congress / Roger Bingham
The zombie concept of identity / David Berreby
Us-them dichotomies will become far more benign / Robert Sapolsky
Multilingualism in Europe / Gloria Origgi
We have the ability to understand one another / Rebecca Goldstein
How technology is saving the world / Diane F. Halpern
Neuroscience will improve our society / Marco Iacoboni
The end of -isms / Marc D. Hauser
The globalization of higher education / Jamshed Bharucha
The power of educated people to make important innovations / Nathan Myhrvold
And now the good news / Brian Eno
We will overcome agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance) / Andrian Kreye
The major climate makeover / William Calvin
Optimism has a bright future / Tor Norretranders
Save the Arctic
now / Gregory Benford
The return of commercial sailing vessels / George Dyson
The ozone hole / Stephen H. Schneider
A new, environmentally sustainable worldview / Scott D. Sampson
PCT allows individuals to address a global problem / James Geary
The challenge presented by Peak Oil / Brian Goodwin
Once and future optimism / Seth Lloyd
The shifting ration of benefit and cost / Colin Blakemore
The sunlight-powered future / Alun Anderson
The coming solar power boom / Oliver Morton
The sorcerer's apprentice / Gregory Cochran
Science on the agenda / Adam Bly
We will embrace the reality of progress / Kevin Kelly
Cities cure poverty / Stewart Brand
New children will be born / Alison Gopnik
A one-way ticket to Mars / Paul C. W. Davies
Geomorphic evidence for early life on Mars / Garniss Curtis
By the early 22nd

century, we will be living on more than one tiny ball in our solar system / Rodney Brooks
The future of human mating / David Buss
The hedonic set point can be raised / Nancy Etcoff
Romantic love / Helen Fisher
Malthus was wrong / Geoffrey Carr
The long view of demographics / W. Daniel Hillis
Research will provide the first effective treatments for many diseases / Ian Wilmut
Early cancer detection / Philip Campbell
Cancer stem cells and novel cancer therapies / Stuart A. Kauffman
The human epigenome project / Jill Neimark
Growing older / Peter Schwartz
We will lead healthy and productive lives well past our tenth decade / Leo M. Chalupa
New prospects of immortality / Marvin Minsky
Personal genomics / George Church
Finding mental illness genes / Samuel Barondes
The end of the 'natural' / Andy Clark
A breakthrough in understanding intelligence is around the corner / Terrence Sejnowski
AI will arise / Jordan Pollack
Technology in education / David Dalrymple
Science as a broadly participatory activity / Neil Gershenfeld
We will finally get mathematics education right / Keith Devlin
The nervous system of the human race has come alive / Alex (Sandy) Pentland
Emergent democracy and global voices / Joichi Ito
Humanity's coming enlightenment / Larry Sanger
Metcalfe's law of minds / Chris Anderson
Altruism on the web / Dan Sperber
The end of the commoditization of knowledge / Roger C. Schank
Metacognition for kids / Gary F. Marcus
The immeasurables / Sherry Turkle
The coming revolution in science education / Leon Lederman
High-resolution images of earth will thwart global villainy / Chris DiBona
Transparency is inevitable / Daniel Goleman
Power is moving to the masses
as a market / Esther Dyson
Capitalism is aligning with the good / Jason McCabe Calacanis
Individuals are empowered in a knowledge-driven economy / Juan Enriquez
Humans will learn to learn from diversity / Daniel L. Everett
Early detection of learning disabilities or difficulties / Howard Gardner
The human response to vast change will involve strange bounces / Joel Garreau
The future of software / David Gelernter
Getting it all wrong / Steve Grand
Unraveling beliefs / Mahzarin R. Banaji
Long-term trends toward honesty to others and self / Robert Trivers
The baby boomers will soon retire / Jonathan Haidt
The evolutionary ability of humankind to do the right things / Haim Harari
When men are involved in the care of their infants, the cultures do not make war / John Gottman
The survival of friendship / Judith Rich Harris
The public will become immune to hype / Roger Highfield
Solving the mind-body problem / Donald D. Hoffman
Print as a technology / Walter Isaacson
Truth prevails
sometimes technology helps / Xeni Jardin
Human intelligence can be increased dramatically / Stephen M. Kosslyn
A new contentism / Kai Krause
The young will take repair of the world into their own hands / Howard Rheingold
Toward a broader sense of global issues and possibilities / Linda Stone
Optimism on the continuum between confidence and hope / Ray Kurzweil
Skeuomorphism / Timothy Taylor
The rise of usability / Marti Hearst
Interpersonal communication will become more profound; rationality will more romantic / Jaron Lanier
Universal telepathy / Rudy Rucker
The best is yet to come / Nicholas Humphrey
The restoration of innocence / Elizabeth F. Loftus
I will be dead wrong again / Thomas Metzinger
The modeling of group behavior / Pamela McCorduck
Assistive listening / David G. Myers
We will find new ways to block pessimism / Randolph M. Nesse
The limits of democracy / Mark Pagel
The world of a wunderkammer / David Pescovitz
Overcoming the burden of monocausalitis / Ernst Poppel
Things could always be worse / Robert R. Provine
The future / Matt Ridley
Humankind is particularly good at

muddling / Paul Saffo
The increasing coalescence of scientific disciplines / Gerald Holton
The end of hegemonies / Barry C. Smith
Understanding sleep / Steven Strogatz
Shortening sleep will enrich our lives / Marcel Kinsbourne
The joys of failing enterprises / Michael Wolff
Copying is what bits are for / Cory Doctorow
Whether solutions are possible / David Deutsch
Reforming scientific and medical publishing via the internet / Beatrice Golomb
The real purity of pure science / Piet Hut
A core decency even the worst government machinations can't hold down / David Bodanis
The rise of autism and the digital age / Simon Baron-Cohen
A second (and better) enlightenment / Irene Pepperberg
Corrective goggles for our conceptual myopia / Corey S. Powell
Index.

Spanning a wide range of topics₇from string theory to education, from population growth to medicine, and even from global warming to the end of world₇What Are You Optimistic About? is an impressive array of what world-class minds (including Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times bestselling authors, and Harvard professors, among others) have weighed in to offer carefully considered optimistic visions of tomorrow. Their provocative ideas may rouse skepticism, but they might possibly change our perceptions of humanity's future.

Social customs.

0061436933 (pbk.) 9780061436932

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