The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? - Hardcover

Tucker, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591845866 ISBN 13: 9781591845867

Publisher: Current, 2014

Synopsis

?Where I saw a thrilling and historic transformation in the world’s oldest idea?the future?other people saw only Target, Facebook, Google, and the government using their data to surveil, track, and trick them . . . But in fact, your data is your best defense against coercive marketing and intrusive government practices. Your data is nothing less than a superpower waiting to be harnessed.” ?FROM THE INTRODUCTION

In the past, the future was opaque?the territory of fortune-tellers, gurus, and dubious local TV weathermen. But thanks to recent advances in computing and the reams of data we create through smartphone and Internet use, prediction models for individual behavior grow smarter and more sophisticated by the day. Whom you should marry, whether you’ll commit a crime or fall victim to one, if you’ll contract a specific strain of flu?even your precise location at any given moment years into the future?are becoming easily accessible facts. The naked future is upon us, and the implications are staggering.
Patrick Tucker draws on stories from health care to urban planning to online dating to reveal the shape of a future that’s ever more certain. In these pages you’ll meet scientists and inventors who can predict your behavior based on your friends’ Twitter updates. They are also hacking the New York City sewer system to predict environmental conditions, anticipating how much the weather a year from now will cost an individual farmer, figuring out the time of day you’re most likely to slip back into a bad habit, and guessing how well you’ll do on a test before you take it. You’ll learn how social networks like Facebook are using your data to turn you into an advertisement and why the winning formula for a blockbuster movie is more predictable than ever.

The rise of big data and predictive analytics means that governments and corporations are becoming much more effective at accomplishing their goals and at much less cost. Tucker knows that’s not always a good thing. But he also shows how we’ve gained tremendous benefits that we have yet to fully realize.
Thanks to the increased power of predictive science, we’ll be better able to stay healthy, invest our savings more wisely, learn faster and more efficiently, buy a house in the right neighborhood at the right time, avoid crime, thwart terrorists, and mitigate the consequences of natural disasters. What happens in a future that anticipates your every move? The surprising answer: we’ll live better as a result.

About this title

Review

"Thought-provoking, eye-opening, and highly entertaining."
--Ray Kurzweil, author of "How to Create a Mind"

Thought-provoking, eye-opening, and highly entertaining.
Ray Kurzweil, author of "How to Create a Mind""

About the Author

PATRICK TUCKER is the deputy editor of The Futurist magazine, as well as director of communications for the World Future Society. His writing has appeared in the Sun, Slate, MIT Technology Review, The Wilson Quarterly, Johns Hopkins Magazine, Encyclopedia Britannica online, and The Utne Reader, among other outlets. Tucker won the 2006 Barry Hannah Prize in short fiction and the 2006 Eugene Walter Award for the Novel. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Current
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1591845866
• ISBN 13: 9781591845867
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 268