What should we be worried about? : real scenarios that keep scientists up at night / John Brockman.

Date:
[2014]
  • Books

About this work

Description

Posing the question "What should we be worried about?" to one hundred fifty of the world's greatest minds, this collection of responses reveals what about the present or the future worries each of them the most.

Publication/Creation

New York, NY : Harper Perennial, [2014]

Physical description

xxvi, 499 pages ; 21 cm

Edition

First edition.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 479-480) and index.

Contents

The real risk factors for war / Steven Pinker -- MADness / Vernor Vinge -- We are in denial about catastrophic risks / Martin Rees -- Living without the Internet for a couple of weeks / Daniel C. Dennett -- Safe mode for the Internet / George Dyson -- The fragility of complex systems / Randolph Nesse -- A synthetic world / Seirian Sumner -- What is conscious? / Timo Hannay -- Will there be a singularity within our lifetime? / Max Tegmark -- "The singularity" : there's no there there / Bruce Sterling -- Capture / Charles Seife -- The triumph of the virtual / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- The patience deficit / Nicholas G. Carr -- The teenage brain / Sarah-Jayne Blakemore -- Who's afraid of the big bad words? / Benjamin Bergen -- The contest between engineers and druids / Paul Saffo -- "Smart" / Evgeny Morozov -- The stifling of technological progress / David Pizarro -- The rise of anti-intellectualism and the end of progress / Tim O'Reilly -- Armageddon / Timothy Taylor -- Superstition / Matt Ridley -- Rats in a spherical trap / Gregory Benford -- The danger from aliens / Seth Shostak -- Augmented reality / William Poundstone -- Too much coupling / Steven Strogatz -- Homogenization of the human experience / Scott Atran -- Are we homogenizing the global view of a normal mind? / P. Murali Doraiswamy -- Social media : the more together, the more alone / Marcel Kinsbourne -- Internet drivel / David Gelernter -- Objects of desire / Sherry Turkle -- Incompetent systems / John Naughton -- Democracy is like the appendix / Dylan Evans -- The is-ought fallacy of science and morality / Michael Shermer -- What is a good life? / David Christian -- A world without growth? / Satyajit Das -- Human population, prosperity growth : one I fear, one I don't / Laurence C. Smith -- The underpopulation bomb / Kevin Kelly -- The loss of lust / Tor Nørretranders -- Not enough robots / Rodney A. Brooks ; That we won't make use of the error catastrophe threshold / William McEwan -- A fearful asymmetry : the worrying world of a would-be science / Helena Cronin -- Misplaced worries / Dan Sperber -- There is nothing to worry about, and there never was / Virginia Heffernan -- Worries on the mystery of worry / Donald D. Hoffman -- The disconnect / Barbara Strauch -- Science by (social) media / Michael I. Norton -- Unfriendly physics, monsters from the id, and self-organizing collective delusions / John Tooby -- Myths about men / Helen Fisher -- The mating wars / David M. Buss -- We don't do politics / Brian Eno -- The black hole of finance / Seth Lloyd -- The opinions of search engines / W. Daniel Hillis -- Technology-generated fascism / David Bodanis -- Magic / Neil Gershenfeld -- Data disenfranchisement / David Rowan -- Big experiments won't happen / Lisa Randall -- The nightmare scenario for fundamental physics / Peter Woit -- No surprises from the LHC : no worries for theoretical physics / Amanda Fefter -- Crisis at the foundations of physics / Steve Giddings -- The end of fundamental science? / Mario Livio -- Quantum mechanics / Lee Smolin -- One universe / Lawrence M. Krauss -- The dangerous fascination of imagination / Carlo Rovelli -- What-- me worry? / J. Craig Venter -- Our increased medical know-how / Esther Dyson -- The promise of catharsis / Andrian Kreye -- I've given up worrying / Terry Gilliam -- Our blind spots / Daniel Goleman -- The anthropocebo effect / Jennifer Jacquet -- The relative obscurity of the writing of Édouard Glissant / Hans Ulrich Obrist -- The danger of inadvertently praising zygomatic arches / Robert Sapolsky -- The belief or lack of belief in free will is not a scientific matter / Howard Gardner -- Natural death / Antony Garrett Lisi -- The loss of death / Kate Jeffery -- Global graying / David Berreby -- All the T in China / Robert Kurzban -- Technology may endanger democracy / Haim Harari -- The fourth culture / Bruce Parker --
Classic social sciences' failure to understand "modern" states shaped by crime / Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán -- Is the new public sphere ... public? / Andrew Lih -- Blown opportunities / Frank Wilczek -- The power of bad incentives / Sam Harris -- Science publishing / Marco Iacoboni -- Excellence / Eric R. Weinstein -- Unmitigated arrogance / Jessica L. Tracy -- The decline of the scientific hero / Roger Highfield -- Authoritarian submission / Michael Vassar -- Are we becoming too connected? / Gino Segre -- Stress / Ariana Huffington -- Putting our anxieties to work / Joseph LeDoux -- Science has not brought us close to understanding cancer / Xeni Jardin -- Society's parlous inability to reason about uncertainty / Aubrey De Grey -- The rise in genomic instability / Eric J. Topol, M.D. -- Current sequencing strategies ignore the role of microorganisms in cancer / Azra Raza, M.D. -- The failure of genomics for mental disorders / Terrence J. Sejnowski -- Exaggerated expectations / Stuart Firestein -- Losing our hands / Susan Backmore -- Losing touch / Christine Finn -- The human/nature divide / Scott Sampson -- Power and the Internet / Bruce Schneier -- Close to the Edge / Kai Krause -- The paradox of material progress / Rolf Dobelli -- Close observation and description / Ursula Martin -- Impact / Bruce Hood -- The complex, consequential, not-so-easy decisions about our water resources / Giulio Boccaletti -- Children of Newton and modernity / Stuart A. Kauffman -- Where did you get that fact? / Victoria Stodden -- Is idiocracy looming? / Douglas T. Kenrick -- The disconnect between news and understanding / Gavin Schmidt -- Super-AIs won't rule the world (unless they get culture first) / Andy Clark -- Posthuman geography / David Dalrymple -- Being told that our destiny is among the stars / Ed Regis -- Communities of fate / Margaret Levi -- Working with others / Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg -- Global cooperation is failing and we don't know why / Daniel Haun -- The behavior of normal people / Karl Sabbagh -- Metaworry / Brian Knutson -- Morbid anxiety / Joel Gold -- The loss of our collective cognition and awareness / Douglas Rushkoff -- Worrying about children / Alison Gopnik -- The death of mathematics / Keith Devlin -- Should we worry about being unable to understand everything? / Clifford Pickover -- The demise of the scholar / Daniel L. Everett -- Science is in danger of becoming the enemy of humankind / Colin Tudge -- Illusions of understanding and the loss of intellectual humility / Tania Lombrozo -- The end of hardship inoculation / Adam Alter -- Internet silos / Larry Sanger -- The new age of anxiety / Gary Klein -- Does the human species have the will to survive? / Dave Winer -- Neural data privacy rights / Melanie Swan -- Can they read my brain? / Stanislas Dehaene -- Losing completeness / Anton Zeilinger -- C. P. Snow's two cultures and the nature-nurture debate / Simon Baron-Cohen -- The unavoidable intrusion of sociopolitical forces into science / Nicholas A. Christakis -- The growing gap between the scientific elite and the vast "scientifically challenged" majority / Leo M. Chalupa -- Present-ism / Noga Arikha -- Do we understand the dynamics of our emerging global culture? / Kirsten Bomblies -- We worry too much about fictional violence / Jonathan Gottschall -- A world of cascading crises / Peter Schwartz -- Who gets to play in the science ballpark / Stephon H. Alexander -- An exploding number of new illegal drugs / Thomas Metzinger -- History and contingency / Paul Kedrosky -- Unknown unknowns / Gary Marcus -- Digital tats / Juan Enriquez -- Fast knowledge / Nicholas Humphrey -- Systematic thinking about how we package our worries / Mary Catherine Bateson -- Worrying about stupid / Roger Schank -- The cultural and cognitive consequences of electronics / Luca De Biase -- What we learn from firefighters : how fat are the fat tails? / Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- Lamplight probabilities / Bart Kosko -- The world as we know it / Richard Foreman -- Worrying-- the modern passion / James J. O'Donnell -- The gift of worry / Robert Provine.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    Medical Collection
    HM901 2014W55
    Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 006229623X
  • 9780062296238