There are two ways to see the future, as science fiction or science facts. The book is a series of essays that try to predict the future with scientific facts we know today, the trends that already exist and the new doors that they will open.

The essays range from the near future to the very distant one, and are divided by themes:
• The future of our Planet
• The future of us
• The future online
• Making the Future
• The distant future


These new technologies will allow us to live in a different way, but will also change our social norms and patterns. This is why sometimes its impact is difficult to predict.


We need to know the difference between the needs of someone who lives in a metropolis and someone who lives in rural areas. After all, greater interconnectivity does not imply greater inclusion. And although the internet has opened access to information and democratized it, it also has the potential to do just the opposite: isolate ourselves in our groups and tribes, and amplify our prejudices and preconceived ideas such as confirmation bias or polarization bias. .

The truth is that before social networks and smartphones we had not realized how narcissistic we were and how much we need to escape from our reality; how much we hated opinions contrary to ours and how nasty anonymity could turn us when we attacked someone.

#WhatTheFutureLooksLike #NetGalley

Jim collects a very interesting collection of solution for the main issues that humanity will face in now and in the future. The solutions are presented as a realistic perspective and creative perspective of these challenges of the modernity. In addition to these elements, the author provides additional reading and good documentation to support the chapters. Excellent choice to use for Philosophy classes especially Ethics.

I wouldn't mind seeing this being included as compulsive reading at schools, given the insight into the incredible advancement in technology, the rate it grows, and how it continuously aids is in our daily lives. What The Future Looks Like is an exceptional study piece for anyone even remotely interested in being at the frontlines of what's going on in the world other than politics.

This was an interesting book. The views on the future were thought out, argued and presented in an beautiful manner. I especially loved the diversity in the presenters, it is not often one find an almost equal amount of male and female researchers in a book like this.
If you have an interest in how the future might look like in different fields, take a look at this book. What "scares" and intrigues me the most is how near we are to the science fiction future.

This is an interesting collection of essays if you want a realistic look at where science and technology will likely take us in the next 20-50 years and beyond. A lot of it is nothing new if you've been paying attention, however, it's comprehensive: climate change, medical advancements, and even time travel.

<i>Thanks to NetGalley and The Experiment for a digital ARC. All views are my own.</i>

WHAT THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE

It’s always fun to prognosticate about the future. This is especially true for science and technology, and how the two are poised to shape the world of tomorrow. What the Future Looks Like, a compendium of essays edited by Jim Al-Khalili, describes the possible futures that may lie in store given current trends in science and technology.

The book is divided into five possible futures, each containing chapters authored by a writer steeped in much of the literature pertaining to the topic at hand:

- The Future of our Planet: in which the effects that demographic trends, the changing biosphere, and climate change will have for life on earth are explored.

- The Future of Us: which considers the future of medicine, genomics and genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and transhumanism.

- The Future Online: containing essays on cloud computing and the Internet of Things, cyber security, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.

- Making the Future: exploring the possibilities that lie ahead in the energy and transport sectors, not to mention those owing to breakthroughs in smart materials and robotics.

- The Far Future: in which the exciting prospect of interstellar travel, the bleak possibility of worldwide apocalypse, and the always alluring idea of teleportation and time travel are given due attention.

Admittedly, there is some degree of variability in how the chapters are written given that each is the work of a different contributor, not to mention the fact that some topics are inherently easy to grasp (like the fact that it’s possible to insert the entire works of Shakespeare–and similar messages–into someone’s DNA; the latter is just code, after all) than others (like quantum mechanics, for obvious reasons). Nevertheless, for the science-oriented, What the Future Looks Like serves not just to whet the palate for what may lie ahead but also to present the current state of knowledge and research on a variety of interesting topics.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Edited by well-known British scientist and writer Jim Al Khalili, this book is a series of speculations, under various headers, as to what we might expect from the future. I wasn't impressed with it, I'm sorry to say. I have a high regard for Khalili, who is a professor of theoretical physics and the Chair of the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey. I've not read any of his books but I've watched some of his TV presentations, and enjoyed them. I was hoping therefore, that in a book that he's edited, I'd get some solid scientific grounding even for a speculative work about the future, but what I got instead was a lot of speculation and very little scientific grounding or even grounding in what;s happening today.

The authors of the various pieces were all scientists, and coming form a cutitng-edge technology sector myself, I was hoping for the speculation to be rooted in the present and logically extrapolating from existing trends and technology to give a realistic assessment, but for too many of these articles, it was evidently nothing more than an opportunity for the contributor to do little more than day-dream and fantasize about what's they hoped was coming rather than put some real effort into what;s actually likely to come. So while some articles were good and interesting, most were not, and the overall effect on me was one of "So what?" and blah.

Sometimes it was unintentionally amusing, such as when one speculator wrote, "Technologies are rarely,if ever,foisted upon us" which is patent nonsense. Did people calling into various agencies for help want a robot answering machine instead of a human? I think not. Did businesses like the one I work for, which typically have patented technology to safeguard, want everyone to legitimately carry a camera onto the premises - in the form of a cell phone? I don't think they wanted that either, but it's technology foisted upon them! Did people with a large vinyl record collection want tapes, then CDs, then e-music, constantly making their collection obsolete?

Did videotape movie watchers who were used to the movie starting pretty much as soon as you set the tape in motion want that technology to be overrun by two different forms of laser disk and then that latter one - the DVD - to be made obsolete by Blu-Ray™, which is now delighted to serve up - out of your control - a barrage of ads, then put on a glittering, overblown mini-movie menu to try and navigate before you can even the movie you paid for? I suspect not. No one asked for that, but it's what was served on us. That's not to say that people don't welcome - or perhaps more accurately, learn to live with - much of this, but they hardly begged for it. It was foisted upon us by progress, and clearly this writer wasn't thinking about what they were writing in this case. Unfortunately, this wasn't an uncommon problem in this book.

In another case, writing about autonomous vehicles, one writer declared, "The important point is that the race has been started," but he utterly failed to explain how it was that this was important! Why is it important to have autonomous vehicles? It may seem obvious to some, and others (autonomous vehicle builders, I'm looking at you) that these vehicles are safer, but judged by the long list of incidents and accidents, and design cluelessness we've read about lately (seriously your car doesn't need to keep track of stationary objects, not even the fire truck stopped front of you?!), some might believe it would be better if we waited a while for the technology to catch up before we make bold prognostications of autonomous and flying cars.

Another writer, talking about smart materials, declared that we could have sensors buried under the asphalt to have passing vehicles trigger street lights to be on only when the vehicle is passing. Unlike the characters in Back to the Future, this writer evidently did not consider a future where there are no roads, or where there's no asphalt because oil has gone, or where there is no need for vehicles to click buttons in the roadbed when a simple RFID chip - which already exists and is in wide use - could do exactly the same job. Talking about smart fabrics to build efficient airplanes assumes we'll always have oil to fuel them. Newsflash: we won't! This blinkered short-sightedness and lack of imagination/thinking outside the box absolutely plagued this book. This writer evidently didn't really give a lot of thought to how the future might look.

Topics covered include: demographics, the biosphere, climate change, medicine, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, transhumanism, the Internet of Things, cyber security, AI, quantum computing, smart materials, energy, transportation, and Robotics, and it ended with complete fantasy which I skipped, as I did the introduction. I wasn't impressed, and especially not by the total lack of cross-fertilization of ideas between all these topics. Everything was so compartmentalized you would think all these advances were taking place in complete isolation from one another. There was no speculation pursuing what happens in real life in that something is invented for one purpose and is then coopted for something else which was never foreseen, and which takes off in ways we had not imagined. Yes, that would involve speculation, but extrapolation from events like this would constitute no more wool-gathering than was already being widely indulged-in here!

There was one other important issue. This book has a whole section on climate change, yet the book itself - a book about what the future looks like - was appallingly wasteful of paper. It was printed in academic format which is, for reasons which utterly escape me, especially in this day and age, dedicated to huge whitespace margins and wide line heights. I estimate, very roughly, that about fifty percent of the page was wasted. Naturally no one wants to see, let alone try and read, a book that has the text so crammed-in that it's illegible, but I certainly don't want to see one delivered by a publisher which seems - as evidenced by its publishing practices - to have a vendetta against the one thing which is doing something about greenhouse gasses: trees.

You can of course snidely argue that "in this day and age" everyone gets their books electronically, which isn't true, but let's run with it. If you get it in ebook format, you don't kill trees, do you? Nope. But larger books still take longer to transmit over the Internet and require proportionately more energy to do so. This book is made available in PDF (Portable Document Format which is owned by Adobe, but which is now available license-free for coding and decoding files). PDF file size for a text document like this is proportional in size to the number of pages. So either way, reducing file size to, let's not say half, but three-quarters of its current size would bring it down from 256 pages to 192. Removing some of the common blank pages contained in it would bring it down more. What would the future hold if every publisher thought that way? It's one more reason why I can't recommend this.

Rating: 3.5/5.0

The book is a collection of different essays written by several authors. It focuses on how the future of humanity might look like in terms of technological advances. The future here is not only the near future but also the not so near one. I liked that the book has not only focused on the bright sides of each advancement but on its drawbacks as well. I found it also interesting to read about what will happen (Apocalypse) if things go wrong and not as planned.

The book is divided into sections like the future of our planet in terms of climate changes, demographics, and biosphere. Then there is the future of humanity and our survival in terms of genetic engineering, medicines, and transhumanism. Then it focuses on the future of the internet and how it will affect us and our world when there will be more use of cloud services and artificial intelligence.

I found the part about the future of transportation, advanced teleporting and time travel to be fascinating a lot but personally, I don't see that happening even in the long run, but who knows what will happen?

There are lots of new information I gained from reading this book but as a tech-savvy, I also found many things discussed here I already knew. So how might this book benefit you in looking into the future will depend on your current knowledge. Nevertheless, this was an interesting read overall.

I have read an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley. The book is set to release in April 2018.

A great general science non-fiction guide for general audiences with words and sentences that are easy to read and comprehend, covering upcoming technology, and written by experts in their respective fields. "New technologies have a way of bettering our lives in ways we cannot anticipate. There is no convincing demonstrated reason to believe that our evolving future will be worse than our present" The book covers topics from climate change to Happy Pills and reminds us that "genes are not destiny".

This is a rather interesting book to read. There are also several chapters that are from women scientists. As I'm someone that enjoys science, I decided to give this book a try. I definitely enjoyed reading this. It has a lot of interesting parts.

Fun, thought provoking and wide ranging read on what we may have in store in the near and not so near future.

Was unable to download the book - my computer has issues with PDF and other file types

Risky Business

When I was born, the five biggest cities were New York, Tokyo, London, Osaka and Paris. Today, they are Tokyo, Delhi, Mexico, Shanghai and Sao Paulo. No one predicted that. Soon Mumbai and Beijing will displace the laggards. The point is, how do we justify predicting the future? Meaning, beyond simply The Jetsons? Jim Al-Kahlili’s collection of essays stabs at it from numerous angles. They are arranged from the inside out: microbiology, artificial intelligence, diminishing biodiversity, climate change, robotics, apocalypse, space travel, and time travel/teleportation.

For the most part, it is all reasonable and recognizable. Scientific breakthroughs are extrapolated and exploded, posing some possibilities for future exploits and exploitation. One of the recurring ideas is DNA as a replacement for digital ones and zeroes in a base eight system. The amount of data in DNA is staggering, and if we can adapt that to our computers, it will be an order of magnitude beyond anything we’re drooling over today.

The book is for a general audience, so even though its chapters come from various academics and PhDs, the words and sentences are easy to read and understand. It is what is now called accessible. This is fortunate, as many of the topics are not understood by anyone at all. How artificial intelligence programs result in the results they do is a mystery. Quantum physics is famous for being incomprehensible. Biochemistry is right in there, opening new vistas we never knew of. We don’t even have names for things biologists are discovering.

Of the 18 chapters, seven are by women scientists, the first time I have come across anything like a balanced presentation. That is as refreshing as the book itself.

David Wineberg

Like any great book about science I was left with even more awe and curiosity from when I started.

I really enjoyed ALIENS, Jim Al-Khalili's last edited essay collection. This wasn't as enticing for me, as I think a lot of the ideas were already discussed in the last collection - it was about the likelihood of meeting aliens, but covered a lot of futurism topics at the same time. I do love the references in these books though, and always find lots of interesting things to read that I might not have stumbled across. A great general science non-fiction guide that will be a brilliant christmas present to any budding scientists or science fans.