Automating technologies threaten to usher in a workless future. But this can be a good thing—if we play our cards right.

Human obsolescence is imminent. The factories of the future will be dark, staffed by armies of tireless robots. The hospitals of the future will have fewer doctors, depending instead on cloud-based AI to diagnose patients and recommend treatments. The homes of the future will anticipate our wants and needs and provide all the entertainment, food, and distraction we could ever desire.

To many, this is a depressing prognosis, an image of civilization replaced by its machines. But what if an automated future is something to be welcomed rather than feared? Work is a source of misery and oppression for most people, so shouldn’t we do what we can to hasten its demise? Automation and Utopia makes the case for a world in which, free from need or want, we can spend our time inventing and playing games and exploring virtual realities that are more deeply engaging and absorbing than any we have experienced before, allowing us to achieve idealized forms of human flourishing.

The idea that we should “give up” and retreat to the virtual may seem shocking, even distasteful. But John Danaher urges us to embrace the possibilities of this new existence. The rise of automating technologies presents a utopian moment for humankind, providing both the motive and the means to build a better future.

“Cuts through the cacophony of information, misinformation, and nonsense on China that circulates in our modern world to give us reliable answers to crucial questions… Should be on the shelf of anyone seeking to understand this fast-rising superpower.”
—Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China

After years of isolation, China is now center stage as an economic and global power, but its rise has triggered wildly divergent views. Is it a model of business efficiency or a threat to American prosperity and security? Thirty-six of the world’s leading China experts from Harvard University’s renowned Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies answer key questions about this new superpower, distilling a lifetime of scholarship into short and accessible essays about Chinese politics, culture, history, economy, approach to the environment, and foreign policy. Their contributions provide essential insight into the challenges China faces, the aspirations of its people and leaders, its business climate, and the consequences of its meteoric ascent. Many books offer information about China, but few make sense of what is truly at stake.

“Impressive… A highly informative, readable collection for scholars and nonscholars alike.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Provides a more nuanced and accessible perspective on the issues China is facing.”
—South China Morning Post

“Erudite yet accessible… The topical reach is impressive.”
—Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China in the 21st Century

In this unique and innovative contribution to environmental security, an international team of scholars explore and estimate the intermediate-term security risks that climate change may pose for the United States, its allies and partners, and for regional and global order through the year 2030. In profiles of forty-two key countries and regions, each contributor considers the problems that climate change will pose for existing institutions and practices. By focusing on the conduct of individual states or groups of nations, the results add new precision to our understanding of the way environmental stress may be translated into political, social, economic, and military challenges in the future.

Countries and regions covered in the book include China, Vietnam, The Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Central Asia, the European Union, the Persian Gulf, Egypt, Turkey, the Maghreb, West Africa, Southern Africa, the Northern Andes, and Brazil.

Here, in a new edition, is Nelson Goodman’s provocative philosophical classic—a book that, according to Science, “raised a storm of controversy” when it was first published in 1954, and one that remains on the front lines of philosophical debate.

How is it that we feel confident in generalizing from experience in some ways but not in others? How are generalizations that are warranted to be distinguished from those that are not? Goodman shows that these questions resist formal solution and his demonstration has been taken by nativists like Chomsky and Fodor as proof that neither scientific induction nor ordinary learning can proceed without an a priori, or innate, ordering of hypotheses.

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims. The controversy surrounding these unsolved problems is as relevant to the psychology of cognitive development as it is to the philosophy of science. No serious student of either discipline can afford to misunderstand Goodman’s classic argument.

The future is not a fixed idea but a highly variable one that reflects the values of those who are imagining it. By studying the ways that visionaries imagined the future—particularly that of America—in the past century, much can be learned about the cultural dynamics of the time.

In this social history, Lawrence R. Samuel examines the future visions of intellectuals, artists, scientists, businesspeople, and others to tell a chronological story about the history of the future in the past century. He defines six separate eras of future narratives from 1920 to the present day, and argues that the milestones reached during these years—especially related to air and space travel, atomic and nuclear weapons, the women's and civil rights movements, and the advent of biological and genetic engineering—sparked the possibilities of tomorrow in the public's imagination, and helped make the twentieth century the first century to be significantly more about the future than the past.

The idea of the future grew both in volume and importance as it rode the technological wave into the new millennium, and the author tracks the process by which most people, to some degree, have now become futurists as the need to anticipate tomorrow accelerates.

The optimism that arrived at the end of the cold war and marked the turn of the Millennium was shattered by September 11. In the aftermath of that event it is not unwarranted pessimism that lines the pages of Grave New World, it is unavoidable reality. Terrorism is but one aspect of many other wider concerns for national and international security, and the contributors to this volume not only warn us, but reward us as well with the clarity of their views into—and possible solutions for—a difficult, complicated future. They speak convincingly of the numerous military and non-military challenges that create security problems—whether those are interstate, intrastate, or transnational—many of which are being dangerously overlooked in public policy debates.

The challenges and complexities might seem insurmountable but the first step in solving problems is recognizing that they exist. Grave New World provides an eye-opening assessment of the prospects for peace and security in the 21st century.

Michael E. Brown frames these issues in his Introduction, "Security Challenges in the 21st Century;" and in his summation, "Security Problems and Security Policy in a Grave New World."

This book is a full-scale exposition of Charles Manski's new methodology for analyzing empirical questions in the social sciences. He recommends that researchers first ask what can be learned from data alone, and then ask what can be learned when data are combined with credible weak assumptions. Inferences predicated on weak assumptions, he argues, can achieve wide consensus, while ones that require strong assumptions almost inevitably are subject to sharp disagreements.

Building on the foundation laid in the author's Identification Problems in the Social Sciences (Harvard, 1995), the book's fifteen chapters are organized in three parts. Part I studies prediction with missing or otherwise incomplete data. Part II concerns the analysis of treatment response, which aims to predict outcomes when alternative treatment rules are applied to a population. Part III studies prediction of choice behavior.

Each chapter juxtaposes developments of methodology with empirical or numerical illustrations. The book employs a simple notation and mathematical apparatus, using only basic elements of probability theory.

After a half-century of glacial creep, television technology has begun to change at the same dizzying pace as computer software. What this will mean--for television, for computers, and for the popular culture where these video media reign supreme--is the subject of this timely book. A noted communications economist, Bruce Owen supplies the essential background: a grasp of the economic history of the television industry and of the effects of technology and government regulation on its organization. He also explores recent developments associated with the growth of the Internet. With this history as a basis, his book allows readers to peer into the future--at the likely effects of television and the Internet on each other, for instance, and at the possibility of a convergence of the TV set, computer, and telephone.

The digital world that Owen shows us is one in which communication titans jockey to survive what Joseph Schumpeter called the "gales of creative destruction." While the rest of us simply struggle to follow the new moves, believing that technology will settle the outcome, Owen warns us that this is a game in which Washington regulators and media hyperbole figure as broadly as innovation and investment. His book explains the game as one involving interactions among all the players, including consumers and advertisers, each with a particular goal. And he discusses the economic principles that govern this game and that can serve as powerful predictive tools.

Between 2010 and 2025, most of the countries of Latin America will commemorate two centuries of independence, and Latin Americans have much to celebrate at this milestone. Most countries have enjoyed periods of sustained growth, while inequality is showing modest declines and the middle class is expanding. Dictatorships have been left behind, and all major political actors seem to have accepted the democratic process and the rule of law. Latin Americans have entered the digital world, routinely using the Internet and social media.

These new realities in Latin America call for a new introduction to its history and culture, which Latin America at 200 amply provides. Taking a reader-friendly approach that focuses on the big picture and uses concrete examples, Phillip Berryman highlights what Latin Americans are doing to overcome extreme poverty and underdevelopment. He starts with issues facing cities, then considers agriculture and farming, business, the environment, inequality and class, race and ethnicity, gender, and religion. His survey of Latin American history leads into current issues in economics, politics and governance, and globalization. Berryman also acknowledges the ongoing challenges facing Latin Americans, especially crime and corruption, and the efforts being made to combat them. Based on decades of experience, research, and travel, as well as recent studies from the World Bank and other agencies, Latin America at 200 will be essential both as a classroom text and as an introduction for general readers.

With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive—although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library’s history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels.

Libraries have always been mix-and-match spaces, and remix is their most plausible future scenario. Speculative and provocative, The Library Beyond the Book explains book culture for a world where the physical and the virtual blend with ever increasing intimacy.

What will work eventually look like? This is the question at the heart of this timely collection. The editors and contributors—a mix of policy experts, academics, and advocates—seek to reframe the typical projections of the “future” of work. They examine the impact of structural racism on work, the loss of family‑sustaining jobs, the new role of gig work, growing economic inequality, barriers to rewarding employment such as age, gender, disability, and immigration status, and the business policies driving these ongoing challenges. 

Together the essays present varied and practical insights into both U.S. and global trends, discuss the role of labor activism in furthering economic justice, and examine progressive strategies to improve the experience of work, wages, and the lives of workers. The Many Futures of Work offers a range of viable policies and practices that can promote rewarding employment and steer our course away from low-wage, unstable jobs toward jobs that lead to equitable prosperity and economic inclusion.

The past decade has been characterized by remarkable advances in meteorological observation, computing techniques, and data-visualization technology. However, the benefit of these advances can only be fully realized with the introduction of a systematic, applied approach to meteorological education that allows well-established theoretical concepts to be applied to modernized observational and numerical datasets.

Historical landmarks, such as wars, coups, and revolutions, seem to arise under unique conditions. Indeed, what seems to distinguish history from the natural and social sciences is its inability to be dissected or generalized in any meaningful way. Yet even complex and large-scale events like the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution can be broken down into their component parts, and, as Bertrand Roehner and Tony Syme show, these smaller modules are rarely unique to the events they collectively compose.

The aim of this book is to analyze clusters of similar "elementary" occurrences that serve as the building blocks of more global events. Making connections between seemingly unrelated case studies, Roehner and Syme apply scientific methodology to the analysis of history. Their book identifies the recurring patterns of behavior that shape the histories of different countries separated by vast stretches of time and space. Taking advantage of a broad wealth of historical evidence, the authors decipher what may be seen as a kind of genetic code of history.

Thirty years ago, our global energy landscape did not look remarkably different from what it does today. Three or four decades from now, it certainly will: dwindling oil reserves will clash with skyrocketing demand, as developing nations around the world lead their citizens into the modern energy economy, and all the while, the grave threat of catastrophic climate change looms ever larger. Energy worries are at an all-time high—just how will we power our future?

With The Powers That Be, Scott L. Montgomery cuts through the hype, alarmism, and confusion to give us a straightforward, informed account of where we are now, and a map of where we’re going. Starting with the inescapable fact of our current dependence on fossil fuels—which supply 80% of all our energy needs today—Montgomery clearly and carefully lays out the many alternative energy options available, ranging from the familiar, like water and solar, to such nascent but promising sources as hydrogen and geothermal power. What is crucial, Montgomery explains, is understanding that our future will depend not on some single, wondrous breakthrough; instead, we should focus on developing a more diverse, adaptable energy future, one that draws on a variety of sources—and is thus less vulnerable to disruption or failure.

An admirably evenhanded and always realistic guide, Montgomery enables readers to understand the implications of energy funding, research, and politics at a global scale. At the same time, he doesn’t neglect the ultimate connection between those decisions and the average citizen flipping a light switch or sliding behind the wheel of a car, making The Powers That Be indispensible for our ever-more energy conscious age.

This book employs a careful, rigorous, yet lively approach to the timely question of whether we can justly generalize about members of a group on the basis of statistical tendencies of that group. For instance, should a military academy exclude women because, on average, women are more sensitive to hazing than men? Should airlines force all pilots to retire at age sixty, even though most pilots at that age have excellent vision? Can all pit bulls be banned because of the aggressive characteristics of the breed? And, most controversially, should government and law enforcement use racial and ethnic profiling as a tool to fight crime and terrorism?

Frederick Schauer strives to analyze and resolve these prickly questions. When the law “thinks like an actuary”—makes decisions about groups based on averages—the public benefit can be enormous. On the other hand, profiling and stereotyping may lead to injustice. And many stereotypes are self-fulfilling, while others are simply spurious. How, then, can we decide which stereotypes are accurate, which are distortions, which can be applied fairly, and which will result in unfair stigmatization?

These decisions must rely not only on statistical and empirical accuracy, but also on morality. Even statistically sound generalizations may sometimes have to yield to the demands of justice. But broad judgments are not always or even usually immoral, and we should not always dismiss them because of an instinctive aversion to stereotypes. As Schauer argues, there is good profiling and bad profiling. If we can effectively determine which is which, we stand to gain, not lose, a measure of justice.

How can we live in such a way that we die only once? How can we organize a society that gives us a better chance to be fully alive? How can we reinvent religion so that it liberates us instead of consoling us?

These questions stand at the center of Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Religion of the Future. Both a book about religion and a religious work in its own right, it proposes the content of a religion that can survive faith in a transcendent God and in life after death. According to this religion—the religion of the future—human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives.

Unger begins by facing the irreparable flaws in the human condition: our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability. He goes on to discuss the conflicting approaches to existence that have dominated the last 2,500 years of the history of religion. Turning next to the religious revolution that we now require, he explores the political ideal of this revolution, an idea of deep freedom. And he develops its moral vision, focused on a refusal to squander life.

The Religion of the Future advances Unger’s philosophical program: a philosophy for which history is open, the new can happen, and belittlement need not be our fate.

The determination of ordinary people to end regional and global conflicts is powerful despite the forces opposing them. The Struggle for Peace explores how average citizens on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict worked for peace in the late twentieth century. Essays by noted scholars are juxtaposed with profiles of individual Israelis and Palestinians involved in peace activism. What emerges is a unique perspective on the prospects for peace in this troubled area.

Coordinated with a documentary film of the same name, the book is designed as a tool for the study of conflict resolution generally and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. The twelve original essays deal with the issues from different disciplinary perspectives: political science (Yehoshafat Harkabi, A. R. Norton, Muhammad Muslih, and Robert Vitalis); history (Avraham Zilkha and Joel Beinin); anthropology (Robert Rubinstein); sociology (Salim Tamari); film (Steven Talley); law (Edward Sherman); and international peacekeeping (Christian Harleman). The human side of the struggle is presented through brief biographies and portraits of twenty-five ordinary Israelis and Palestinians involved in peace activities in Israel and the West Bank.