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The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future

A computer beats the reigning human champion of Go, a game harder than chess. Another is composing classical music. Labs are creating life-forms from synthetic DNA. A doctor designs an artificial trachea, uses a 3D printer to produce it, and implants it and saves a child's life.

Astonishing technological advances like these are arriving in increasing numbers. Scholar and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa uses this book to alert us to dozens of them and raise important questions about what they may mean for us.

Breakthroughs such as personalized genomics, self-driving vehicles, drones, and artificial intelligence could make our lives healthier, safer, and easier. But the same technologies raise the specter of a frightening, alienating future: eugenics, a jobless economy, complete loss of privacy, and ever-worsening economic inequality. As Wadhwa puts it, our choices will determine if our future is Star Trek or Mad Max.

Wadhwa offers us three questions to ask about every emerging technology: Does it have the potential to benefit everyone equally? What are its risks and rewards? And does it promote autonomy or dependence? Looking at a broad array of advances in this light, he emphasizes that the future is up to us to create — that even if our hands are not on the wheel, we will decide the driverless car's destination.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE: The Here and Now

1. A bitter taste of dystopia

2. Welcome to Moore’s world

3. How change will affect us personally and why choices matter

4. If change is always the answer, what are the questions?

PART TWO: Does the technology have the potential to benefit everyone equally?

5. The amazing and scary rise of Artificial Intelligence

6. Remaking education with avatars and A.I.

7. We are becoming data; our doctors, software

PART THREE: What are the risks and the rewards?

8. Robotics and Biology: The inevitable merging of man and machine

9. Security and privacy in an era of ubiquitous connectivity

10. The drones are coming

11. Designer genes, the bacteria in our guts, and precision medicine

PART FOUR: Does the technology foster autonomy or dependency?

12. Your own private driver: Self-driving cars, trucks, and planes

13. When your scale talks to your refrigerator: The Internet of Things

14. The future of your body is electric

15. Almost free energy and food

Conclusion: So will it be Star Trek or Mad Max?

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

About the authors

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 240
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781626569713
  • Genres
  • technology, business, science, economics, futurism, buisness
  • Release date
  • 2017