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MIT's Media Lab, opening in 1985, spent much of its first decade helping create now-familiar areas such as digital video and multimedia. The success of this agenda is now leading to a growing focus on how bits meet atoms--how electronic information overlaps with the everyday physical world.

The World Future Society is a nonprofit educational and scientific organization for people interested in how social and technological developments are shaping the future. A nonpartisan clearinghouse for ideas about the future, including forecasts, recommendations, scenarios, alternatives, and more.

Books

2020 Vision by Stan Davis & Bill Davidson, 1992. Information management and biotechnology are reshaping the basic structure of American enterprise. In this bold and innovative analysis, Davis and Davidson explain what these changes mean and how entrepreneurs and executives can prepare for the challenges of tomorrow. Still as relevant today as it was when it was first written. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, 1995. Written by the founder of MIT's Media Lab, it is mostly a history of media technology, but in the last chapter and the epilogue Negroponte offers visionary insight into what "being digital" means for our future. He praises computers for their educational value but recognizes certain dangers of technological advances.

The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World by Jeremy Rifkin & J P Tarcher, 1998. The authors are mostly concerned with the dangers of the new biotechnology and present numerous compelling reasons we should be, too. Many of these dangers involve the inevitable commercialization of genetically engineered life forms. They warn that bioengineering will wreak havoc with the gene pool and the natural environment. While conceding that there are benefits to biotechnology, the authors make it clear that the risks far outweigh the rewards.

Clicking: 16 Trends to Future Fit Your Life, Your Work, and Your Business by Faith Popcorn & Lys Marigold, 1996. From the author of the best-selling Popcorn Report comes an inspiring new book that offers the reader a chance to find his own niche and take charge of his future by using trends to "click into" new careers and lifestyles that are more rewarding and fulfilling.

Computer Confluence: Exploring Tomorrow's Technology by George Beekman, 1999. The computer industry, the telecommunications industry, and the home entertainment industry are converging around digital information technology; this technological confluence is changing our world rapidly and irreversibly. Computer Confluence is a guidebook for anyone interested in understanding the basics of the new technology without being bogged down by technical trivia. It includes a cross-platform multimedia CD-ROM that brings many of the book's ideas to life through 3-D animation and video. An accompanying Web site includes annotated links to hundreds of related sites.

Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation by Don Tapscott, 1997. The baby boom has an echo and it's louder than the original. Now the N-Gen is changing business, learning, culture, family, politics, markets, and society. Exhaustively researched and documented, this book provides excellent insights into current trends and future thinking from the Nintendo Generation that is poised to conquer our world.

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet by Sherry Turkle, 1997. A balanced and nuanced look at some of the ways that cyberculture helps us comment upon real life (what the cybercrowd sometimes calls RL). Turkle looks at the way various netizens have used the Internet, and especially MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions), to learn more about the possibilities available in apprehending the world. She explores such topics as gender identity and artificial life. First-person accounts from many Internet users provide compelling reading and good source material for readers to draw their own conclusions.

New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly, 1998. Forget supply and demand. Forget computers. Today communication, not computation, drives change. We are rushing into a world where connectivity is everything and where old business know-how means nothing. In this new order, success flows primarily from understanding networks, and networks have their own rules. In New Rules, Kelly presents ten fundamental principles that invert the traditional wisdom of the industrial world.

The Roaring 2000s: Building the Wealth and Life Style You Desire in the Greatest Boom in History by Harry S. Dent, Jr., 1999. Having already predicted changes in our economy and the workplace with uncanny precision, Harry Dent now turns his eye toward changes in our lifestyle. Here, Dent predicts that due to the convergence of the mainstreaming of the Internet and other technologies and the peak spending years of the aging baby boomers, we are on the verge of the greatest boom in history, with unprecedented opportunity for investors and entrepreneurs. Dent not only offers detailed investment strategies aimed at exploiting the coming boom, but he also explains future trends in the job market, technology, demographics, and real estate.

Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind by Hans P. Moravec, 1998. Moravec is a pioneer designer of robots, and here extrapolates how their future--and humanity's--may evolve over the next century. With computer power increasing exponentially, Moravec regards the emergence of machine intelligence as inevitable and clearly explains the software ideas that would allow it. After outlining four possible generations of robots, culminating in "Exes" (ex-humans) that design and build themselves, Moravec releases his imagination and has them trooping off Earth, preserved as a nature refuge, and colonizing space in a Darwinian process.

Technotrends: How to Use Technology to Go Beyond Your Competition by Daniel Burrus & Roger Gittines, 1994. Technological innovations are directing business trends; but most corporations involved in restructuring operations are missing the boat when it comes to changing assumptions based on old predictions. Burrus provides his money-making wisdom to a wide audience, telling how to recognize and understand the various technologies which will change lives.

What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives by Michael L. Dertouzos, 1997. The author reaches into the coming century to paint a compelling, rationally developed picture of what's ahead. Dertouzos' fluid freedom from the Pollyanna-ism or paranoia that afflict so many of his contemporaries brings to his visions the ring of both conviction and plausibility--and excitement as well. His crystal explanations and fascinating examples are irresistible. The result is a book as enjoyable as it is important.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner, 1997. In this fascinating book, historian of science Edward Tenner takes a fine-toothed comb to several realms of technological intervention and discovers a resolute pattern of "revenge effects"--paradoxical, ironic consequences of the steps we take to improve our lives. Whether proliferating technology is fated to lead us to utopia or not, we can be certain that it has plenty of tricks up its sleeve.