What should we be worried about? : real scenarios that keep scientists up at night / John Brockman.

New York, NY : Harper Perennial, [2014]

xxvi, 499 pages ; 21 cm

First edition.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 479-480) and index.

The real risk factors for war / Steven Pinker -- MADness / Vernor Vinge -- We are in denial about catastrophic risks / Martin Rees -- Living without the Internet for a couple of weeks / Daniel C. Dennett -- Safe mode for the Internet / George Dyson -- The fragility of complex systems / Randolph Nesse -- A synthetic world / Seirian Sumner -- What is conscious? / Timo Hannay -- Will there be a singularity within our lifetime? / Max Tegmark -- "The singularity" : there's no there there / Bruce Sterling -- Capture / Charles Seife -- The triumph of the virtual / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- The patience deficit / Nicholas G. Carr -- The teenage brain / Sarah-Jayne Blakemore -- Who's afraid of the big bad words? / Benjamin Bergen -- The contest between engineers and druids / Paul Saffo -- "Smart" / Evgeny Morozov -- The stifling of technological progress / David Pizarro -- The rise of anti-intellectualism and the end of progress / Tim O'Reilly -- Armageddon / Timothy Taylor -- Superstition / Matt Ridley -- Rats in a spherical trap / Gregory Benford -- The danger from aliens / Seth Shostak -- Augmented reality / William Poundstone -- Too much coupling / Steven Strogatz -- Homogenization of the human experience / Scott Atran -- Are we homogenizing the global view of a normal mind? / P. Murali Doraiswamy -- Social media : the more together, the more alone / Marcel Kinsbourne -- Internet drivel / David Gelernter -- Objects of desire / Sherry Turkle -- Incompetent systems / John Naughton -- Democracy is like the appendix / Dylan Evans -- The is-ought fallacy of science and morality / Michael Shermer -- What is a good life? / David Christian -- A world without growth? / Satyajit Das -- Human population, prosperity growth : one I fear, one I don't / Laurence C. Smith -- The underpopulation bomb / Kevin Kelly -- The loss of lust / Tor Nørretranders -- Not enough robots / Rodney A. Brooks ; That we won't make use of the error catastrophe threshold / William McEwan -- A fearful asymmetry : the worrying world of a would-be science / Helena Cronin -- Misplaced worries / Dan Sperber -- There is nothing to worry about, and there never was / Virginia Heffernan -- Worries on the mystery of worry / Donald D. Hoffman -- The disconnect / Barbara Strauch -- Science by (social) media / Michael I. Norton -- Unfriendly physics, monsters from the id, and self-organizing collective delusions / John Tooby -- Myths about men / Helen Fisher -- The mating wars / David M. Buss -- We don't do politics / Brian Eno -- The black hole of finance / Seth Lloyd -- The opinions of search engines / W. Daniel Hillis -- Technology-generated fascism / David Bodanis -- Magic / Neil Gershenfeld -- Data disenfranchisement / David Rowan -- Big experiments won't happen / Lisa Randall -- The nightmare scenario for fundamental physics / Peter Woit -- No surprises from the LHC : no worries for theoretical physics / Amanda Fefter -- Crisis at the foundations of physics / Steve Giddings -- The end of fundamental science? / Mario Livio -- Quantum mechanics / Lee Smolin -- One universe / Lawrence M. Krauss -- The dangerous fascination of imagination / Carlo Rovelli -- What-- me worry? / J. Craig Venter -- Our increased medical know-how / Esther Dyson -- The promise of catharsis / Andrian Kreye -- I've given up worrying / Terry Gilliam -- Our blind spots / Daniel Goleman -- The anthropocebo effect / Jennifer Jacquet -- The relative obscurity of the writing of Édouard Glissant / Hans Ulrich Obrist -- The danger of inadvertently praising zygomatic arches / Robert Sapolsky -- The belief or lack of belief in free will is not a scientific matter / Howard Gardner -- Natural death / Antony Garrett Lisi -- The loss of death / Kate Jeffery -- Global graying / David Berreby -- All the T in China / Robert Kurzban -- Technology may endanger democracy / Haim Harari -- The fourth culture / Bruce Parker --

Classic social sciences' failure to understand "modern" states shaped by crime / Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán -- Is the new public sphere ... public? / Andrew Lih -- Blown opportunities / Frank Wilczek -- The power of bad incentives / Sam Harris -- Science publishing / Marco Iacoboni -- Excellence / Eric R. Weinstein -- Unmitigated arrogance / Jessica L. Tracy -- The decline of the scientific hero / Roger Highfield -- Authoritarian submission / Michael Vassar -- Are we becoming too connected? / Gino Segre -- Stress / Ariana Huffington -- Putting our anxieties to work / Joseph LeDoux -- Science has not brought us close to understanding cancer / Xeni Jardin -- Society's parlous inability to reason about uncertainty / Aubrey De Grey -- The rise in genomic instability / Eric J. Topol, M.D. -- Current sequencing strategies ignore the role of microorganisms in cancer / Azra Raza, M.D. -- The failure of genomics for mental disorders / Terrence J. Sejnowski -- Exaggerated expectations / Stuart Firestein -- Losing our hands / Susan Backmore -- Losing touch / Christine Finn -- The human/nature divide / Scott Sampson -- Power and the Internet / Bruce Schneier -- Close to the Edge / Kai Krause -- The paradox of material progress / Rolf Dobelli -- Close observation and description / Ursula Martin -- Impact / Bruce Hood -- The complex, consequential, not-so-easy decisions about our water resources / Giulio Boccaletti -- Children of Newton and modernity / Stuart A. Kauffman -- Where did you get that fact? / Victoria Stodden -- Is idiocracy looming? / Douglas T. Kenrick -- The disconnect between news and understanding / Gavin Schmidt -- Super-AIs won't rule the world (unless they get culture first) / Andy Clark -- Posthuman geography / David Dalrymple -- Being told that our destiny is among the stars / Ed Regis -- Communities of fate / Margaret Levi -- Working with others / Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg -- Global cooperation is failing and we don't know why / Daniel Haun -- The behavior of normal people / Karl Sabbagh -- Metaworry / Brian Knutson -- Morbid anxiety / Joel Gold -- The loss of our collective cognition and awareness / Douglas Rushkoff -- Worrying about children / Alison Gopnik -- The death of mathematics / Keith Devlin -- Should we worry about being unable to understand everything? / Clifford Pickover -- The demise of the scholar / Daniel L. Everett -- Science is in danger of becoming the enemy of humankind / Colin Tudge -- Illusions of understanding and the loss of intellectual humility / Tania Lombrozo -- The end of hardship inoculation / Adam Alter -- Internet silos / Larry Sanger -- The new age of anxiety / Gary Klein -- Does the human species have the will to survive? / Dave Winer -- Neural data privacy rights / Melanie Swan -- Can they read my brain? / Stanislas Dehaene -- Losing completeness / Anton Zeilinger -- C. P. Snow's two cultures and the nature-nurture debate / Simon Baron-Cohen -- The unavoidable intrusion of sociopolitical forces into science / Nicholas A. Christakis -- The growing gap between the scientific elite and the vast "scientifically challenged" majority / Leo M. Chalupa -- Present-ism / Noga Arikha -- Do we understand the dynamics of our emerging global culture? / Kirsten Bomblies -- We worry too much about fictional violence / Jonathan Gottschall -- A world of cascading crises / Peter Schwartz -- Who gets to play in the science ballpark / Stephon H. Alexander -- An exploding number of new illegal drugs / Thomas Metzinger -- History and contingency / Paul Kedrosky -- Unknown unknowns / Gary Marcus -- Digital tats / Juan Enriquez -- Fast knowledge / Nicholas Humphrey -- Systematic thinking about how we package our worries / Mary Catherine Bateson -- Worrying about stupid / Roger Schank -- The cultural and cognitive consequences of electronics / Luca De Biase -- What we learn from firefighters : how fat are the fat tails? / Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- Lamplight probabilities / Bart Kosko -- The world as we know it / Richard Foreman -- Worrying-- the modern passion / James J. O'Donnell -- The gift of worry / Robert Provine.