The skeptics' guide to the future What yesterday's science and science fiction tell us about the world of tomorrow

Review by Booklist Review

People have a long history of trying to predict the future, especially with the rise of modern science and science fiction. Several futuristic tropes have become common, such as cyborgs, brain-machine interfaces, robots, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, immortality, space exploration and settlement, energy weapons, faster-than-light travel, flying cars, and more. Novella turns his skeptical eye on futurism, assessing whether any of these predictions are possible, from the likely to the probably impossible. He identifies several common fallacies which plague our attempts at futurism, most notably the tendency to overestimate short term advancement while underestimating long term change, and our insistence on picturing people in the future as just like us. Old technology persists for surprisingly long times, and new disruptive technology can radically alter who we are and our relationship to the world. Predicting the future isn't an exact science, but skeptical scientific inquiry can help assess the likelihood of our various visions for it. A fun overview of both the current state of modern science and a general survey of the history of futurism.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Neurologist Novella (The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe) and his siblings, cohosts of the podcast The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, deliver an entertaining evaluation of futurism and an account of why the majority of predictions miss the mark. As they note, "predictions of the future are really just reflections of the present. And that means we're really bad at predicting what the future will bring," thanks largely to cognitive biases. The authors cite scientist and sci-fi author Isaac Asimov as a prime example: in the 1950s, his fiction imagined that in thousands of years, the future would be analog and consist of "hat-wearing, cigar-smoking, male domination." As for what might actually come to be, the authors cover synthetic life ("still likely a few decades off"), artificial intelligence (there "does not appear to be any reason" human-level AI is impossible to achieve), and wearable tech (the "loader exosuit" in Aliens isn't too far off). It's a cogent look at what is and isn't plausible, infused with plenty of sci-fi references, from Wall-E to The Matrix. The result is pop science done right. Agent: Rob Kirkpatrick, Kirkpatrick Lit. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A gimlet-eyed look at the promises of technology and futurists past. If people were to live to be 1,000, and if one of them committed some heinous crime, would it be just for a life sentence to last multiple centuries? Thus one of the thought experiments in the latest by the Novellas, a follow-up to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. The authors argue that while we have made tremendous progress in technology in the past half-century, it's been in arenas that we didn't quite expect: not the cure for cancer or the solution to climate change but instead fun apps to distract us from the world. "I drive to work in a car that would most likely seem ordinary to a driver from the 1950s," write the authors, "but they would likely be blown away by my GPS and entertainment system." That we might expect different comes from the overselling of a gleaming future by science fiction--e.g., the promise in 2001 that we would have traveled to Jupiter two decades ago or the projection that we'd have so much leisure time that we'd all become masters of our various corners of the universe. Instead, as the authors note, modern life proves "the deep philosophical principle that shit happens," with most of us incapable of seeing it coming. The authors venture a few predictions of their own, including the expansion of robotics and the mechanization of biology, creating replacement parts within our bodies that are far more effective than the current titanium knees and hips. "But why limit ourselves to the original body plan?" he rejoins. "We can even add extra limbs." One thing may be certain: If we live forever or very nearly so as "genetically modified cyborgs," there won't be much need for children--so maybe don't buy stock in diaper manufacturers. An intriguing if bet-hedging work of futurology that calls into question the whole business of futurology itself. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---