WELCOME TO THE FUTURE

Forget personal jet packs, flying cars, and food pills—welcome to a coming world of robot servants, gene splicing, really long life spans, and fusion power.

In what is more a set of speculative thought pieces than specific predictions, Hulick gathers sound-bite quotes from dozens of researchers and embeds them in general ruminations on the directions that new technology seems to be taking us in fields from cybernetics and space colonization to the search for better energy sources. A focus on the positive leads her to mention but downplay troubling issues such as the already-scary hackability of the internet of things and the near possibility (more likely probability) of “designer babies.” She also argues that artificial intelligence will never trump the human sort because it intrinsically lacks “common sense” and lays out a broadly brushed future scenario in which robots will do all the work while people, on universal basic incomes, enjoy a “never-ending vacation.” Sure. She also regards the use of wind and other renewable power sources as just placeholders until atomic fusion becomes practical, and looks to next-generation 3-D printers she calls “maker machines” to feed the world. Wolski’s blocky paintings, more retro than futuristic, add unimaginative images of generic gizmos or human figures of diverse racial presentations playing with a pet robo-dog, strolling among dinosaurs, climbing out of TARDIS-like teleportation booths, posing in lab coats, or rumbling past on a toddler assembly line. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An optimistic if superficial overview of our brave new (technological) world.