Here are 100 books that Futureproof fans have personally recommended if you like
Futureproof.
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My entire academic life of over 20 years has been focused on how to help people and organizations become their Best Self. I am the author of 15 books. Six of my books were published by Academic Presses: Cambridge University Press; Stanford University Press; and Columbia Business School Publishing. My work has appeared in over 400 global media publications including Fortune magazine, European Business Review, HBR, SHRM, Fast Company, WIRED, Forbes, INC., Huffington Post, Washington Post, Business Week, the Financial Times,CEO World as well as on CNBC Squawk Box, Fox Business News, Big Think, WSJ Radio, Bloomberg Radio with Kathleen Hayes, Dow Jones Radio, MSNBC Radio, Business Insider, and Wharton Radio.
In the Era of Smart Technology, many of you will have work if you can think differently than the Technology can think. Examples are thinking creatively, innovatively, and going into the unknown and figuring things out.
This book is all about Insights - seeing new associations, new connections, new trends, patterns, and irregularities. Gary Klein gives you the tools to become an explorer: an Insightful Person who can open new avenues, new opportunities, and new ways of thinking. I learned a lot from Gary Klein, and I am sure you will, too.
Insights--like Darwin's understanding of the way evolution actually works, and Watson and Crick's breakthrough discoveries about the structure of DNA--can change the world. We also need insights into the everyday things that frustrate and confuse us so that we can more effectively solve problems and get things done. Yet we know very little about when, why, or how insights are formed--or what blocks them. In Seeing What Others Don't, renowned cognitive psychologist Gary Klein unravels the mystery. Klein is a keen observer of people in their natural settings--scientists, businesspeople, firefighters, police officers, soldiers, family members, friends, himself--and uses a marvelous…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have always asked why too many times I am told. From my early days studying psychology to working for Myspace out in LA and now with clients in London, my fondness for understanding what drives change, inertia, and pain has always been a focus. I knew from an early age that understanding people and how they are affected by, use and fear change and technology would be a useful skill to focus on. Doing so has enabled me to work with big brands, and smart cookies and interview some of the best minds of our generation. I recently brought everything under one roof, TBD Group, to help people see around corners.
Not only is this book small and well-designed, but the cover jumps out at you and you instantly know what the topic is about. All about how big tech is obsessed with, and how they monetize around, attention, the book doesn’t pull any punches with the issues surrounding the advertising world and enables you to see areas that can be used, exploited, and focused on to help your business, thinking and how you beat competitors. Tim (the author) previously worked at Google and worked on AI public policy; I highly recommend you follow his work.
In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financialises attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising - the beating heart of the internet - is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers' attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself - much like subprime mortgages - is…
I have always asked why too many times I am told. From my early days studying psychology to working for Myspace out in LA and now with clients in London, my fondness for understanding what drives change, inertia, and pain has always been a focus. I knew from an early age that understanding people and how they are affected by, use and fear change and technology would be a useful skill to focus on. Doing so has enabled me to work with big brands, and smart cookies and interview some of the best minds of our generation. I recently brought everything under one roof, TBD Group, to help people see around corners.
Rob used to write for The New York Times and I was lucky enough to interview him on my podcast Mouthwash. His book is an inspiring read that helps you notice more around you. Beyond this it’s a rallying cry for attention and how you choose to utilise it. The book isn’t meant to be a business book, but I have found that there are massive sections that shouldbe applied to business – especially in this remote working world. Buy one for you and one for a friend.
Distracted? Overwhelmed? Feel like your attention is constantly being pulled in different directions? Learn how to steal it back.
Accessible and inspiring, this book features 131 surprising and innovative exercises to help you tune out white noise, get unstuck from your screen and manage daily distractions.
Make small yet impactful changes and bring focus to the things and people that are most important to you.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I have always asked why too many times I am told. From my early days studying psychology to working for Myspace out in LA and now with clients in London, my fondness for understanding what drives change, inertia, and pain has always been a focus. I knew from an early age that understanding people and how they are affected by, use and fear change and technology would be a useful skill to focus on. Doing so has enabled me to work with big brands, and smart cookies and interview some of the best minds of our generation. I recently brought everything under one roof, TBD Group, to help people see around corners.
Tracey’s first book was a smash hit with tech and business folks alike for its take on where identity is going after she had a run-in with Facebook. From the initial fascinating (and frankly scary) story, Tracey explores how identity is changing and that’s important for any business out there. You’ll explore all facets of what identity means – and could mean – in the future. As we rethink ourselves and create digital twins, understanding the psychology behind this area will be business-critical in the coming years.
In the future, how many identities will you have? How many do you want? Digital technology is causing us to think differently about who we are and who we could become, but with the right knowledge we can turn this incredible capacity to our advantage.
'Who am I?' is one of the most fundamental questions of all. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to answer as technology enables us to negotiate and create many different versions of ourselves.
In our digital, data-driven world, Facebook gets a say in verifying who we are, science can alter our biology, and advances in…
I have been writing for several years now, but my undergraduate degree is in geochemistry and I have always had a keen interest in science. For me, writing and science go hand-in-hand because both represent an attempt to describe our world in different ways. Throughout my time studying science and spending time with other scientists, I became fascinated with the culture of academia and the competition that pushes people to compromise in the name of progress. We know far less than we don’t know about the universe, and speculative fiction makes a creative effort to fill in this gaping lack of knowledge while presenting us with important thought experiments.
I found the premise of The Candy House very intriguing – the novel is built around a new technology that allows you to download your consciousness.
The science is a little far-fetched (I certainly hope it is, anyway) and yet the reverberations of this fictional technology are easy to imagine in real life. The unique way in which the book is written, each chapter a window into a different life, shows how technology affects us all in small and large ways, whether we subscribe to it or not.
What I love most about this book, though, is the contrast between the intended altruistic uses for ‘Own Your Unconscious’ and the various uses which devolve from it. It all rings too true.
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD A Time Magazine Must-Read 'A complex, compelling read that showcases Egan's masterful storytelling' TIME 'A dazzling feat of literary construction' VOGUE
From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time comes an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own--featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.
It's 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He's forty, with four kids, and restless when…
I am now a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. I co-wrote Mind Hacks with technologist Matt Webb; we had great fun doing it. My research has always been in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, using experiments to understand the mind and brain and how they fit together.
Clark is a philosopher and shows with wit and many great examples how our minds evolved to be a tight meshing between our brains, bodies, and the environment. In this account, our human endowment is to naturally absorb technologies, whether as simple as a stick or as complex as the internet, into our thinking and so warp and expand our consciousness and our capacity for thought.
So much discussion of artificial intelligence is about what computers will do better than humans or instead of humans. This book explodes the whole notion: intelligence has always been artificial, and the most interesting questions are about how we’re going to use technology to think. Onwards!
From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg, the person who is both flesh and metal, brain and electronics. But philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark sees it differently. Cyborgs, he writes, are not something to be feared-we already are cyborgs. In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural practices into our existence. Technology as simple as writing on a sketchpad, as familiar as Google or a cellular phone, and as potentially…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I've been teaching and writing in the field of the history of technology for over six decades, and it's not too much to say that the field and my professional career grew up together. The Society for the History of Technology began in 1958, and its journal, Technology and Culture, first appeared the following year. I've watched, and helped encourage, a broadening of the subject from a rather internal concentration on machines and engineering to a widening interest in technology as a social activity with cultural and political, as well as economic, outcomes. In my classes I always assigned not only original documents and scholarly monographs but also memoirs, literature, and films.
My admiration for this book is demonstrated by the way in which I quite shamelessly ripped off its title for my own. It has been said that America is the only nation that began perfect and hoped to improve. The engine of that improvement, from the earliest days of the Republic, had been new technologies but by the middle of the pre-Civil War period some Americans began to realize that the “improvement” they had unleashed was beginning to erode the very “perfection” that they had hoped to enshrine in the nation’s foundation. Writers, artists, and creative intellectuals in general are society’s canaries in the mine shaft, and the great names of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, George Innes, Charles Sheeler, and their colleagues—attempted to describe, understand, and perhaps heal the destructive effects of the machine. As Marx concludes, “what was a grim possibility…
For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define-and continues to give depth to-the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the "pastoral" and "progressive" ideals which characterized early 19th-century American culture, and which ultimately evolved into the basis for much of the environmental and nuclear debates of contemporary society.
I'm an author, advisor, speaker, podcaster, and citizen concerned about humanity’s relationship with advanced artificial intelligence. After following developments in AI for many years, I noticed a disconnect between the rapid rate of progress in AI and the public’s understanding of what was happening. The AI issue affects everyone, so I want everyone to be empowered to learn more about how AI will have a large impact on their lives. As a senior policy advisor and a member of the Board of Advisors for Canada's leading safety and governance network, books such as these help me stay informed about the latest developments in advanced artificial intelligence. I hope my recommendations will help you to critically consider how humans should co-exist with this revolutionary technology.
This excellent book provides a detailed history of technology and employment during the Industrial Revolution and up to the present. It is very well-researched and provides many useful insights.
For example, although the term ‘Luddite’ is often used negatively to describe those resistant to technology, the real Luddites were justified in their concerns as they were ultimately displaced due to automation. People were even put to death because they destroyed some of the new machines.
One of the main ways AI might affect our lives is in terms of employment, or rather, a lack of employment.
Frey empowers us to have a greater understanding of previous technological innovations and how they affected workers so that we are able to have more nuanced opinions on the matter.
"Made me look at the industrial revolution, invention, sleeping beauties, contexts and the forces that shape our societies differently."-David Byrne, New York Times Book Review
How the history of technological revolutions can help us better understand economic and political polarization in the age of automation
From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As Carl Benedikt Frey shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long…
I’m a systems thinker (Senior Fellow at an environmental think tank, author of 14 books and hundreds of essays) who’s addicted to trying to understand the world. After a few decades, the following is my state of understanding. Power is everywhere and determines everything in our lives. Whether due to the physical power of energy channeled through technology, or the social power of organizations and money, we’re enabled or disabled daily. During the last century, fossil-fueled humanity has overpowered planetary systems, as evidenced by climate change, species extinctions, and resource depletion. Few think critically about power. Unless we start doing so, we may be inviting the ultimate disempowerment—extinction.
Over the last two centuries, human per capita energy usage has grown 800 percent, while the population has also grown to the same degree. Life has changed profoundly due to our adoption of fossil fuels—but puzzlingly few people are curious to understand energy’s role in society and history. Smil fills the void to overflowing with this detailed account of how people have harvested energy from their environments, and how doing so has changed the ways they live.
A comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society throughout history, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel–driven civilization.
"I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next 'Star Wars' movie. In his latest book, Energy and Civilization: A History, he goes deep and broad to explain how innovations in humans' ability to turn energy into heat, light, and motion have been a driving force behind our cultural and economic progress over the past 10,000 years. —Bill Gates, Gates Notes, Best Books of the Year
Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
For most of my life, stillness eluded me. I struggled to be present in any moment, to experience joy or comfort, let alone peace. It took me a virtual lifetime to understand that this exterior version of me, with its incessant mental chatter and negative bias, could no longer control me. I reached a breaking point. Divorced after a lifetime partnership, played out of my most recent company, kids all grown up—utterly alone and without meaningful purpose, the hard inner journey began. I spent years focused on my own journey of self and spiritual development. The payoff is I am now not only more present to life but able to help others on their journeys.
Pollan approached the exploration of psychedelics with rigorous journalism, history, and neuroscience, but with deeply human storytelling.
It resonated with me and pushed me in the direction of experiencing psychedelics for my own growth. Pollan approaches a controversial subject with intellectual humility and curiosity while never losing sight of the personal and cultural implications. It helped me reconsider long-held assumptions about the mind, healing, and what it means to be open to change.
"Pollan keeps you turning the pages . . . cleareyed and assured." -New York Times
A #1 New York Times Bestseller, New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018, and New York Times Notable Book
A brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs--and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences
When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such…
