Those of us who are old enough will remember the 1950s, when “Japanese import” meant balsa wood trinkets. Several decades later, the first Japanese cars started appearing in the US. They were widely derided as cheap looking, rust-prone tin cans, at first. No longer. In recent years, Japanese cars have led the world in reliability…
One of the earliest books that could be called utopian was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It described a future scientific society, devoid of competition, in which everything was run scientifically. It was all to be rational and orderly. As a 16 year old, I was captivated by his vision. I later realized, with hindsight, that…
While I’d prefer that a Celebrationist experiment be tried because of pure enthusiasm, that’s rarely enough for groups of people to create great change. Great societal change seems to come on the heels of perceived necessity. Accelerating automation will soon provide this perception for people pretty much everywhere, and that’s the reason I expect a…
The research and writing of this book has obviously been a massive undertaking. Not so obviously, it is incredibly up to date with current technological advances. I started to read it as just another attempt at idealizing a Utopian Society. I had all the usual misgivings about his glossing over of inconvenient truths, or leaving…