Window On The Future

St. Petersburg covers the city's political and social history, as well as its infinite contributions to scholarship, culture, and world politics.

WTF? can be an expression of amazement or an expression of dismay. In today’s economy, we have far too much dismay along with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame. In this combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action, Tim O'Reilly, Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and the founder of O’Reilly Media, explores the upside and the potential downsides of today's WTF? technologies. What is the future when an increasing number of jobs can be performed by intelligent machines instead of people, or done only by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to our consumer based societies—to workers and to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? Is income inequality and unemployment an inevitable consequence of technological advancement, or are there paths to a better future? What will happen to business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? How should companies organize themselves to take advantage of these new tools? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional institutions? How can individuals continue to adapt and retrain? Will the fundamental social safety nets of the developed world survive the transition, and if not, what will replace them? O'Reilly is "the man who can really can make a whole industry happen," according to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet (Google.) His genius over the past four decades has been to identify and to help shape our response to emerging technologies with world shaking potential—the World Wide Web, Open Source Software, Web 2.0, Open Government data, the Maker Movement, Big Data, and now AI. O’Reilly shares the techniques he's used at O’Reilly Media to make sense of and predict past innovation waves and applies those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how today’s world-spanning platforms and networks, on-demand services, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. He provides tools for understanding how all the parts of modern digital businesses work together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem succeeds along with them. The core of the book's call to action is an exhortation to businesses to DO MORE with technology rather than just using it to cut costs and enrich their shareholders. Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. O'Reilly replies, “Only if that’s what we ask them to do! Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won’t run out of work till we run out of problems." Entrepreneurs need to set their sights on how they can use big data, sensors, and AI to create amazing human experiences and the economy of the future, making us all richer in the same way the tools of the first industrial revolution did. Yes, technology can eliminate labor and make things cheaper, but at its best, we use it to do things that were previously unimaginable! What is our poverty of imagination? What are the entrepreneurial leaps that will allow us to use the technology of today to build a better future, not just a more efficient one? Whether technology brings the WTF? of wonder or the WTF? of dismay isn't inevitable. It's up to us!

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green

An Instant New York Times Bestseller “This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It's as simple, and as ambitious, as that.” —Ezra Klein An Oxford philosopher makes the case for “longtermism” — that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more — or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today. In What We Owe The Future, philosopher William MacAskill argues for longtermism, that idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it’s not enough to reverse climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital, not human. If we make wise choices today, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.

As the world moves closer to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, it seems that the whole earth is in turmoil. In the Bible we find that the Savior himself foretold such events. But we are also told that the Lord's followers will find refuge. How will that occur, and where will that happen?In 1999, Suzanne Freeman briefly passed away during surgery before returning to mortality. While in the spirit world, she was taken by the Savior to the Window of Life. In this heavenly window, she was shown scenes of future world events, including natural disasters and warfare that will impact everyone on earth. The Lord's followers will be affected, but they will band together against their enemies. Those who are prepared to weather these trials will be ready to meet their Savior. Suzanne was told to share what she had seen when she returned to earth. Her message is a story of the faith and courage that Christ's followers will display in the coming years leading to the Savior's millennial reign.

"Glass in Building" opens up a whole range of fascinating design possibilities for the planning architect. Glass has long served as a translucent room closing element, but its range of possible uses is actually much wider. It not only offers protection against the external world, for example, noise or fire; despite its apparent fragility, it can even take on load-bearing functions in supporting structures. In combination with various different finishing methods, materials, and coatings, it also satisfies exacting structural-physical standards. "Glass in Building" offers a clear, compact, and illustrated overview of the material-appropriate use of this varied and versatile material in building construction and provides information that goes far beyond the basics on designing with glass and producing and using specialized glass products, as well as on the building and planning regulations that must be taken into account when constructing with glass. A selection of exemplary realized projects rounds out the theoretical section. Das Bauen mit Glas eröffnet dem planenden Architekten faszinierende gestalterische Möglichkeiten. Schon lange dient es als lichtdurchlässiger Raumabschluss, ist aber weitaus vielfältiger einsetzbar: Glas bietet nicht nur Schutz vor der Aussenwelt, etwa gegen Lärm oder Feuer, sondern kann trotz seiner vermeintlichen Zerbrechlichkeit sogar lastabtragende Funktionen innerhalb eines Tragwerks übernehmen. In Kombination mit verschiedenen Veredelungsmethoden, Materialien und Beschichtungen erfüllt es auch hohe bauphysikalische Anforderungen. „Detail Practice: Konstruktiver Glasbau" liefert einen kompakten, anschaulichen Überblick über den materialgerechten Einsatz dieses facettenreichen Baustoffs in der Baukonstruktion und vermittelt weit über die Grundlagen hinausreichende Informationen zum Entwerfen mit Glas, zur Herstellung und Anwendung spezieller Glasprodukte sowie zu den baurechtlichen Regelungen, die im Glasbau zu berücksichtigen sind. Eine Auswahl beispielhafter realisierter Projekte rundet den theoretischen Teil ab.