Tomorrow's People: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel - Hardcover

Greenfield, Susan

3.32

63 ratings by Goodreads

9780713996319: Tomorrow's People: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713996315 ISBN 13: 9780713996319

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2003

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The book is an exploration of how this century is going to change not just the way we think, but also what we actually think with - our own individual minds. How will new technologies transform the way we see the world? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we may be standing on the brink of a mind make-over far more cataclysmic than anything that has happened before. As we appreciate the dynamism and sensitivity of our brain circuitry, so the prospect of directly tampering with the essence of our individuality becomes a possibility.

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Review:

Tomorrow's People is Susan Greenfield's bold attempt to describe how 21st-century technology is changing the way we think and feel. Our increasing ability to manipulate electronic media, robots, genes, reproductive biology and minds is indeed dramatically changing the way some of us live. Susan Greenfield gets to grip with the most important of these changes and most importantly with the effects they are going to have on future generations.

Baroness Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain is very well placed and qualified as a neuroscientist and acclaimed writer (The Private Life of the Brain) to do some serious star-gazing, only what she is looking at is very grounded at the personal level and the here and now. Her wide and informed perspective runs from gadgets and gizmos to terrorism via DNA and the cyberworld. According to our response to such future changes we can be categorised as technophiles, technophobes or cynics according to Susan Greenfield. But as she rightly points out, the main danger is going to be the growing divide between the technologically advanced world and the rest which will, as she says, be the vast majority. The great challenge for the future is how to avoid the descent into a very dangerous schism between a relatively small developed world locked into economic growth to feed its lifestyle and the ever-growing underdeveloped world that will be increasingly excluded by poverty.

Tomorrow's People is a thought-provoking and challenging book. It can be uncomfortable reading especially as it demands that we think about and make personal decisions about these hugely important issues that will increasingly impact on future generations. As Susan Greenfield warns, "the bottom line of this book is that the private ego is the most precious thing we each have, and it is far more vulnerable now than ever before". --Douglas Palmer

Review:

'A brave and stimulating book' John Cornwell, Sunday Times

'A passionate warning... Tomorrow's People increased my eager anticipation of life to come' Financial Times

'Greenfield makes an important contribution to the changes she foretells just by writing about them' Sunday Herald

'Baroness Greenfield's purpose is to issue a warning... As professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, she is well-placed to understand the impact of the next generation of mind-altering drugs' The Economist

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