Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018)

Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outd...

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Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World" (Little, Brown, 2023)

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products ...  Show more

Laurie Parsons, "Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown" (Manchester UP, 2023)

Climate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. Laurie Parsons's book Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown (Manchester UP, 2023) opens our eyes. Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Anthony Hodgson, "Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World" (Triarchy Press, 2011)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Recently I had a chance to sit down for a long overdue chat with Anthony (Tony) Hodgson. When we last spoke it happened to be for my very first episode of Systems and Cybernetics. We talked about his newest book at the time: Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for Ne ...  Show more

CRISPR & bioethics
Science In Action

In the decade since the genome editing capabilities of CRISPR-Cas9 emerged, research into novel medicines has boomed – but alongside progress comes new ethical considerations. Controversy erupted in 2018, when Chinese scientist He Jiankui created the first babies with edited geno ...  Show more

AI and human extinction
BBC Inside Science

In the headlines this week eminent tech experts and public figures signed an open letter that read “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”One of the signatories was Geoffrey Hi ...  Show more

Sound solutions
Discovery

We've been building computers to think like us for years, but our ability to replicate human senses has been impossible. Until now. This technological revolution is starting to profoundly change not only how we interact with the world around us, but is allowing us to see, hear, s ...  Show more