A new book by the inventor of the Internet, former Vice President Al Gore, is hitting the bookstores on January 29th.
Titled “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change“, it attempts to be a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come.
In particular, Al Gore’s book covers the following principles, that are presently re-forming both computing and humanity:
- Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.
- The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
- The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.
- A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
- Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
- There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.
Coming on the heels of “An Inconvenient Truth“, Al Gore’s book “The Future” is striving to be the vision of its writer, and a projection of the demands that modern technology is imposing on the human race.
Will you be buying it? 😀
