RADICAL NEXT

A blueprint for a healthier coexistence with technology.

In her nonfiction debut, futurist and technology entrepreneur Rad helps readers acclimate to a world “where change accelerates far faster than any standardized test or rubric can reflect or contain.” Humanity is experiencing huge advances in processing power, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, along with the advent of all kinds of neural interfaces on the horizon—technological transformation on a scale never seen before. The situation heralds what the author refers to as “the wholesale sunsetting of humanity’s current OS,” and in these pages she encourages her readers to take the leap into the new world. Rad’s not advocating a complete overhaul of that old “operating system,” but rather a reclamation of what she holds to be essential human skills: “connection, compassion, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity.” The author walks readers through various aspects of the coming post-human future, from digital platform algorithms to the “attention economy,” with its concentration on “extracting dollars from our eyeballs, clicks, tracking cookies, and more.” Throughout the illustrated, bullet-pointed chapters, Rad affirms the centrality of the human experience as a compass to navigate the technological changes in the near future. The author has concerns about major subjects like artificial intelligence, worrying, “if we’re feeding a system that’s essentially just a fancy copy machine, it might be able to emulate connection, but we’re getting imitation goods.” On this subject and a couple of others, Rad can be too casually dismissive; when she comments that “people who think AI will render the creative arts obsolete don’t understand how AI currently works,” for instance, she’s missing the point—many of those people are worrying about how AI will work as the tech grows more sophisticated. Still, her open-minded optimism carries the book.

A fast-paced and philosophical look at adapting to technological revolutions.