Edge what should we be worried about

Also, growth is now expected to solve the problems over overindebted individuals, businesses and nations.

Over the past 30 years, globalization and debt-driven consumption across the planet became the tool of generating economic growth. That planetwide growth is destroying the Earth's environment and using up finite resources, especially water. Those factors, plus unsustainable debt levels rising in all nations, threatens to end an unprecedented years of growth and expansion. Fifty years ago, nuclear annihilation might have topped the list. No, what we should be worrying about is superstition, fundamentalism, anti-scientific bias, the dumbing-down of just about everything—including ourselves—and the pervasive, addictive presence of the Internet.

I merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me A man would not be human if he did not care would reveal himself. But what if scientists worried? Annually John Brockman, founder of the famous discussion platform allows Edge.

The responses are then collected and published in book form. This time, Brockman asked the question: "Where should we should be worried about? The result can be read in the book recently published x caffeine for your mind. They talk briefly and powerfully about the concerns that keep them busy, such as more and more people are becoming increasingly stress the consequences of a major Internet outage, and that we have ceased to explore the space The darkest fears of the leading lights and rising stars of science, brought together by the Edge's John Brockman, could keep us all awake at night.

Its editor, cultural impresario John Brockman, may well have you struggling to get your shut-eye as he sets out to keep us on our toes. The trick this time lies in the tone of a book of answers to questions that Brockman poses annually to science's great and good on his Edge website.

It's really not all good news. In , Edge asked what we were optimistic about. Six years later, the tone sounds like a pessimistic rejoinder: what shouldwe be worried about? But with Brockman it's rarely simple. He invited people to share a scientific worry that might not be on the popular radar, or one they think should drop off the radar.

At the end of the exercise, Brockman's crew has left us with a net balance of new fears. But they also introduce us to some big ideas. As psychologist Daniel Goleman puts it: "Effective worrying focuses our attention on a genuine threat and leads to anticipating solutions.

We care about the Third World War, aging, drug use but also about himself - zabrinjavanja. In the book "What Should We Be Worried About 'series of celebrity scientist reveals his greatest concerns and answers the question of how to prevent them.

What should we be worried? That's the question John Brockman, founder Edge. He asked them to discover what they are most concerned, with special emphasis on scenarios that have not yet appeared on the global radar. The greatest minds of our time in the field of neuroscience, economics, philosophy, physics, psychology, biology and many other areas of its proposed ideas that will bring a revolution in the understanding of the modern world.

I've really come to look forward to these annual collections from contributors to Edge. Every year editor John Brockman throws out a question to scientists of any discipline to address. The responses are short essays you can snack on like brain-stretching popcorn.

This year the responses are ones that may keep you up at night, so be warned. All of the contributors address the question of what the real threats to our planet and way of life are, as opposed to the false fears that distract us too easily.

The topics range all over the scientific map; the likelihood of war, advances in medicine and health care, population growth and distribution, the advance of the virtual, global economics What should we be worried about?

Real Scenarios that keep scientists up at night. This is the title of the new book edited by the literary agent John Brockman , founder of the website Edge. Every year, Brockman asks this group a " question. This is year, nothing less than answers were published, of which I provide a meager sample here. The telescope, that allows us to see far in space and thus back in time, giving us an unprecedented understanding of our own existence, is a far superior tool.

Reese regards the internet as the greatest human invention of all time. In barely two decades, it has become so essential to our lives and work that one cannot imagine doing almost anything without it. In his famous and wonderfully heartening letter of fatherly advice, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave his young daughter Scottie a list of things to worry and not worry about in life.

Among the unworriables, he named popular opinion, the past, the future, triumph, and failure "unless it comes through your own fault. What Fitzgerald touched on, of course, is the quintessential anxiety of the human condition, which drives us to worry about things big and small, mundane and monumental, often confusing the two classes.

It was this "worryability" that young Italo Calvino resolved to shake from his life. A wonderful book classified all of our worries in five general categories that endure with astounding prescience and precision, but we still struggle to identify the things truly worth worrying about — and, implicitly, working to resolve — versus those that only strain our psychoemotional capacity with thedeathly grip of anxiety.

Question: "What should worry us in the future? And how many people, so many answers about what people should pursue in the future. List of people interviewed includes winners of Nobel prize, authors of science fiction and a lot of scholars in psychology, physics or biology. Below is a short list of the most interesting answers She highlighted the possible adverse effects of excessive gaming and social networking, and the UNICEF estimate that 40 per cent of teenagers worldwide lack access to secondary education.

I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world's teenagers access to education,' she said. Computer scientist David Gelernter answering the annual question of Edge.

If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word's value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society's ability to communicate in writing decays.

Anxiety is not only the most common mental problem in the United States, it verges on a national obsession. Last year, New York Magazine declared it the signature diagnosis of our time with Xanax as its pharmacological mascot, taking over from depression and Prozac in the s.

The New York Times devotes an entire ongoing series to probing the anxious mind. And the online forum the Edge asks as its key question for " what should we be worried about?

Before we know it, we're not just worrying about love, death, sickness, children, money—we're worrying about the worrying itself. Each December for the past 15 years, John Brockman, a literary agent, search among business cards to invite the best scientists and writers discuss what occasion of scientific concepts can improve the cognitive ability of humanity.

The topic we discussed in December last year is "What do we have to worry about in ? Does not need to fear that any young person is inventing nuclear weapons in some neighborhood low, because this work needs a lot of financial resources and it is difficult to do it without being noticed by people. However, if this young man has a laptop with access to the Internet, you can devote a few hours every day to take advantage of electronic defects in the world, and hardly anyone notices.

In addition, the cost is very low, also the risk of being punished after being caught. The biologist and paleontologist Scott D. Sampson was the only one to get the scoop on natural disasters and man's aggression in the environment, and only Giulio Boccaletti drew attention to the alarming decrease of water resources of the planet.

Jonathan Gottschall cited violence in fiction. No more than two participants proved worried about economic growth tied to financial speculation.

Detail: one, Satyajit Das, is a financier. The population explosion never forgotten gained new contours with eugenics less and better children practiced in post-Mao China as part of its hegemonic ambitions. I hope that additional readers will share their thoughts, fears and worries in the Comments. Like this: Like Loading Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public.

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