Future Civilisation

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Future of Humanity by Michio Kaku, read by Feodor Chin. Human civilization is on the verge of spreading beyond Earth. More than a possibility, it is becoming a necessity: whether our hand is forced by climate change and resource depletion or whether...

Today's unprecedented pace of change leaves many people wondering what new technologies are doing to our lives. Has social media robbed us of our privacy and fed us with false information? Are the decisions about our health, security and finances made by computer programs inexplicable and biased? Will these algorithms become so complex that we can no longer control them? Are robots going to take our jobs? John Browne presents an impassioned defence of progress and innovation and argues that we need not and must not put the brakes on technological advance.

With the invention of printing, reading books moved from being an act performed only by priests and aristocrats into an individual, even private activity. This change helped spark the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution - in which punctuation played a crucial role. As long as texts were read out loud by only an educated elite there was no need for punctuation to mark pauses, full stops or questions. 

Modern cities are the most complex and fragile structures ever built. A single power failure can cascade into chaos. A single pandemic can turn density into a death sentence. A single metre of sea-level rise can displace hundreds of millions. But for the first time in ten thousand years, there is an alternative. THE LAST CITY describes a civilisation in which every home generates its own energy, harvests its own water, grows a portion of its own food, recycles its own waste, monitors its own health, and connects to the world by satellite.