Technology, nature and the future

Philosophy

Holds arguments about what technology, artificial intelligence and environmental change do to people, and about obligations to future generations.

29 books on Technology, nature and the future, 1 of them tier 1, recommended by 26 people including Patrick Collison and Stewart Brand.

29 books · 29 experts

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Amusing Ourselves to DeathNeil Postman, 1985
What Technology WantsKevin Kelly, 2010
The Alignment ProblemBrian Christian, 2020
The Clock of the Long NowStewart Brand, 1999
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After WarmingDavid Wallace-Wells, 2019

The best books on Technology, nature and the future 29

Amusing Ourselves to Death

T1 Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman · 1985

Television as a medium that reshapes public discourse into entertainment

Open Library

What Technology Wants

T2 What Technology Wants

Kevin Kelly · 2010

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Recommended byPatrick Collison Stewart Brand Nir Eyal

The Alignment Problem

T2 The Alignment Problem

Brian Christian · 2020

The technical safety agenda OpenAI claims to serve.

Open Library

“Brian Christian's account of the state of AI alignment research is one Altman has flagged as the best current-state overview for a general audience. It covers the difficulty of specifying what we want AI to do in a way that makes the problem legible without reducing it.”Sam Altman

Recommended bySam Altman

The Clock of the Long Now

T3 The Clock of the Long Now

Stewart Brand · 1999

Brand's book is the founding document of institutional long-term thinking. It proposes a 10,000-year clock as a forcing function for civilizational patience, and along the way develops the concept of pace layers — the idea that different structures (fashion, commerce, governance, culture, nature) change at radically different speeds, and that confusing these speeds is the root of most short-termism.

Open Library

“Brand's own argument for ten-thousand-year thinking, built around the Long Now Foundation's project to construct a mechanical clock that will run for a millennium. It is the clearest statement of his civilizational design philosophy: institutions and artifacts can be built to outlast the attention spans of their makers.”Stewart Brand

Recommended byBret Victor Phil Libin Stewart Brand

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

T3 The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

David Wallace-Wells · 2019

Wallace-Wells's inventory of worst-case climate projections is included here not as a climate book but as a case study in what happens when institutions consistently discount long-term risk. The scenarios he describes are already visible in the data; they were predictable decades ago. This is what the failure of long-term thinking looks like from inside it.

Open Library

Recommended byGeorge Hatzis Vinod Khosla

What We Owe the Future

T3 What We Owe the Future

William MacAskill · 2022

MacAskill's longtermist argument, grounded in effective altruism, is the most rigorous philosophical case for prioritizing future people. His core claim — that if the future contains vast numbers of people, influencing its trajectory matters more than almost anything we might do for the present — is informed by Derek Parfit's work on personal identity and is the most demanding version of the long-term thinking argument.

Open Library

Recommended byAndrew Wilkinson Ali Abdaal

The Good Ancestor

T3 The Good Ancestor

Roman Krznaric

Krznaric surveys six ways of thinking that orient people toward longer horizons — from the cathedral builders of the medieval period to Iroquois seven-generation decision-making. His concept of 'acorn brain' versus 'marshmallow brain' is a useful diagnostic for why institutions favor short-term reward even when long-term thinking is available.

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The Outermost House