Humanity must steer its evolution. As human knowledge moves a step ahead of Darwin’s theories, this book presents the emergence of human-made meta-evolution shaping our alternative futures. This novel process poses fateful challenges to humanity, which require regulation of emerging science and technology which may endanger the future of our species. However, to do so successfully, a novel ‘humanity-craft’ has to be developed; main ideologies and institutions need redesign; national sovereignty has to be limited; a decisive global regime becomes essential; some revaluation of widely accepted norms becomes essential; and a novel type of political leader, based on merit in addition to public support, is urgently needed. Taking into account the strength of nationalism and vested interests, it may well be that only catastrophes will teach humanity to metamorphose into a novel epoch without too high transition costs. But initial steps, such as United Nation reforms, are urgent in order to contain calamities and may soon become feasible. Being both interdisciplinary and based on personal experience of the author, this book adds up to a novel paradigm on steering human evolution. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern history, evolution sciences, future studies, political science, philosophy of action, and science and technology. It will also be of wide appeal to the general reader anxious about the future of life on Earth. Comments on the Corona pandemic add to the book’s concrete significance.

The fourteen award-winning essays in this volume discuss a range of novel ideas and controversial topics that could decisively influence the course of human life on Earth. Their authors address, in accessible language, issues as diverse as: enabling our social systems to learn; research in biological engineering and artificial intelligence; mending and enhancing minds; improving the way we do, and teach, science; living in the here and now; and the value of play. The essays are enhanced versions of the prize-winning entries submitted to the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) essay competition in 2014. FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the key aspects of Norbert Elias's work.

This book addresses the survival of humankind. Our world is the best it has ever been, but it is not sustainable. It is self-destructive; it is marked by war, which can destroy the world in a single day, the destruction of natural and human capital within 10 years, and technologies which could be both beneficial and destructive. We have no future if we continue living as we do currently, and even if we do nothing. This book highlights the kinds of changes which are required. Wars are not biologically necessary and are useless; the culture that established wars can eliminate them. Poverty, hunger and inequality destroy human capital. These destructions can be overcome by changing economic and political paradigms and our mindset. Empathy, freedom, curiosity and wisdom are required.

Today, it is widely recognized that in order to meet environmental challenges, it will not simply be enough to make our lifestyles greener; also critical is putting an end to the modern conception of the human as master and possessor of nature. However, to bear fruit, this change in anthropology must also be accompanied by a revision in our conception of technology. Since the Enlightenment and the development of industrialization, technology no longer seems to be subject to the guiding principles set by the Greeks: prudence and the search for the right measure in all, which leads to the care of beings and the world. Care in Technology analyzes the historical changes that have led technology to become an unthinkable part of care, and care an unthinkable part of technology. It also establishes the conditions for care to once again become a regulatory principle of the activity of engineers who design technology.

This book examines the relationship between terrorism and counterterrorism and how it operates within the broader context of communication, control, power, and democratic governance at the national, international, and transnational level. A culmination of decades of research on the challenges that liberal democracies face in dealing with terrorism, this work provides an innovative framework that maps out the broader context in which terrorism and counterterrorism interact and co-evolve – the terrorism–counterterrorism nexus. In a series of models moving from local to global perspectives, the framework places this nexus within the broader context of social, cultural, political, and economic life. This framework provides a tool for maintaining situational awareness in a multi-tiered, networked world where geography and history are splintering into a rainbow of perspectives and locales, revealing the contested nature of space and time themselves. This book will be of much interest to students of political violence, terrorism studies, communication studies, and international relations, as well as security professionals.

This book studies strategic goals of advanced extra-terrestrial civilisations, and the implications they have for planet Earth. The theoretical framework is based on logical arguments and statistical considerations. The book explains various empirically and statistically confirmed phenomena for which science has currently no convincing explanation. These phenomena include the existence of religious beliefs, the existence of dreams, the existence of the mental disorder schizophrenia, the statistical evidence for some parapsychological phenomena, and the fact that the human brain capacity decreased since the human civilisation emerged from hunter-gatherers. The theory can be outlined as follows. A technologically highly advanced civilisation settled Earth millions of years ago and has installed its computational infrastructure under the surface of the Earth. The members of the civilisation have uploaded their minds to computers and live in a virtual reality. Their technological infrastructure includes facilities for detecting and manipulating electromagnetic signals at arbitrary position on Earth. They used intelligent programs for directing evolution on Earth, and are now in the process of developing methods for rewiring the human brain. This is done with the goal of controlling human thought processes and to prevent humans from becoming a threat for other civilisations. The first chapter proves the hypothesis with statistical and logical arguments. Putative implications for physics are derived, and creativity and mental illnesses are re-examined in the context of the developed theory. The book then provides a reinterpretation of human history. The last chapter illustrates the developed theory with some channelling reports.

What is the next chapter in Judaism’s story, the next step in its journey? The dramatic changes of recent decades invite us to explore what role Judaism is to play in this new era. As the digital future becomes the present, Danny Schiff makes the case that the period known as “modernity” has come to an end. Noting the declining strength of Conservative and Reform Judaism, the largest US Jewish movements of modernity, he argues for new iterations of Judaism to arise in response to the myriad of weighty questions that now confront us about what it means to be human. Here is an account of the digital age through a Jewish lens, in which Schiff examines Jewish teachings and traditions, exploring what moral insight they might have to offer in this period of great flux. He marshals the thought of well-known futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Noah Harari to forecast the exponentially larger shifts in the human condition that lie ahead, and proposes that a countercultural Judaism could have renewed relevance in addressing some of the pressing issues that confront humanity in the twenty-first century.

A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women. Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider. In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics. Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”