Technology has not only moved very quickly in the past few years, but it has greatly impacted our everyday lives. With this type of momentum, almost everyone wonders, at one time or another, how technology will influence our future. The Catalog of Tomorrow doesn’t predict the future, rather, it puts together the trends that will shape our future lives and allows us to envision the direction that these trends will take us.
The book is divided into sections with titles such as “Our Tools”, “Our Lives”, “our Society”, and “Our Planet”. Each section is then broken down into logical sub-topics, and further subdivided into extremely interesting issues. For instance: “Our Tools” includes Bioscience, which includes articles on Gene Therapy, Cloning, New Drugs, and New Vaccines.
Individual articles are written by many different contributors. This works well in this book because the subjects are so varied that, not only don’t you mind going on to a different author, but it is usually extremely interesting to get a different viewpoint on each subject. Articles are often written by experts in their fields. For instance, the article on The Future of the Classroom is written by Margaret Riel, a noted expert on educational technology. Even when the contributors are not recognized experts, the writing generally has a good flow and is thought-provoking.
Over one hundred different trends are covered in this book. Wearable computers, smart appliances, cryonics, ubiquitous computing, quantum computing, fuel cells, cyberterrorism, floating cities, and telemedicine are just a few of them. With so many subjects the reader gets just a taste of the subject. After reading an article, I found that I often wanted more information. The forward-thinking editor of this book appeased me with a section called “Want More?”, which is found at the end of each article. This area lists pertinent Web sites where a reader can find more information on the given subject.
The book is well-illustrated with visuals often used to explain topic or to break the monotony of the text. Each area also has a listing of Provocations….. questions to start the reader thinking. “Will 2050 usher in the first cancerless generation?”, “Will people pay extra not to be advertised to?”. “Will our wallets come with technical support contracts?”
This is exactly what this book does well. It starts the reader thinking about technology and how it will affect them in the future. So, if you want to do a little thinking, this book is for you.
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