The Future of Work, Money, Learning, Real Estate, the Internet, Happiness, & More
Discover more from Future Essentials
The Future of Work, Money, Learning, Real Estate, the Internet, Happiness, & More
Future Essentials - Edition 42
Hey friends!
It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, and time to do some deeper reading.
This edition highlights 10 books that offer solutions for the future.
Hope you enjoy it. Leave a comment and let me know which book sparks your interest.
Happy summer reading!
Misha
How to get the most from this newsletter:
Scan the whole thing, from top to bottom.
Select the item/s that interest you the most.
Dive in.
FUTURE OF WORK
AI and the Future of Creative Work by Michael Filimowicz
The future of creative work will be more complicated than “the robots will take our jobs.” The workplace is becoming increasingly hybridized, with human and computational labor complementing each other. Some economic roles for the former will no doubt fade over time, while new roles are created to produce artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies and implementations for productivity. New tools for the generation and personalization of content across platforms will be as ubiquitous as the automation of repetitive tasks in content creation workflows. Cultural conceptions of what it means to be a creative worker will necessarily change as a result of these transformations in human-machine labor.
The volume covers the possibilities of humans and robots developing collegial relationships, creative cybernetics as machines and artists become co-creators of art, the reconcentration of corporate power as AI transforms the music industry, the rhetoric of algorithm-driven cultural production in streaming media and how artisans provide a model of counter-hegemony to automation processes.
FE Take: The future of work and knowledge is a partnership between AI and humans. But will this human-machine relationship be healthy for humans? And how can we ensure that it is? This book gives you a deeper understanding of this relationship and what the future holds for work. Must-read!
FUTURE OF MONEY
The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad
The world of finance is on the cusp of a major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states―indeed, all of us. As Eswar Prasad makes clear, the end of physical cash will fundamentally rewrite how we live. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies are just the beginning: spurred by their emergence, central banks will increasingly develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve dramatically as global corporations like Meta, Apple, and Amazon join the game.
Prasad shows how these innovations will redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions. This transformation promises greater efficiency and flexibility, but also carries the risk of instability, lack of accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the worst of what is to come.
FE Take: Money makes the world go round, yet most people have no idea how it works. This book changes that! You will come away illuminated and with a clear understanding of money, its future, and how to it can work for you.
FUTURE OF LEARNING
Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Dr. Jeremy Bailenson
Virtual reality is able to effectively blur the line between reality and illusion, granting us access to any experience imaginable. These experiences, ones that the brain is convinced are real, will soon be available everywhere.
In Experience on Demand, Jeremy Bailenson draws upon two decades spent researching the psychological effects of VR to help readers understand its upsides and possible downsides. He offers expert guidelines for interacting with VR and describes the profound ways this technology can be put to use to hone our performance, help us recover from trauma, improve our learning, and even enhance our empathic and imaginative capacities so that we treat others and ourselves better.
FE Take: Most people think of VR as an escape from reality, and something that takes away from our human experience. But it’s not. It’s a powerful means of deepening and enhancing our human experience and is the future of learning.
FUTURE OF REAL ESTATE
REAL ESTATE'S NEW WORLD ORDER: How Demographics, Data, and Digitization are transforming investments in the world's largest asset class by Omar Al Kurdi
Split into four parts, the book begins with the case for real estate investing for the novice reader. Subsequent sections explore the waves of change shaping real estate’s new world order, and the geographies that will dominate it. Next, it dives into the rise of Asia and the changing global flow of real estate investment dollars. The final section introduces the advent of digitization and the blockchain, and describes implications of tokenization on acquisitions, transactions, registrations, and other disruptions we can expect.
This book is your comprehensive guide to leveraging the trends and technologies impacting real estate. It will show you how to level up, play a bigger game, and gain financial freedom by getting on top of the world’s largest and most important asset class.
FE Take: The sections on digitization, blockchain technology, and tokenization are particularly useful. It’s one of the few books to discuss this new trend in real estate.
FUTURE OF THE INTERNET
This first book from the influential entrepreneur, tech investor, and founding father of web3 is a “potent exploration of the power of blockchains to reshape the future of the Internet—and how that affects us all.”
It walks through the history of the internet, showing how it has gone through three major design eras: the first focused on democratizing information (read), the second on democratizing publishing (write), and the third on democratizing ownership (own). LINK
FE Take: I wrote about this is our last edition but it merits inclusion here. The internet is the most powerful technological force on the planet. Its future impacts us all in multiple ways, and we need to understand it. Read Write Own will help you do that.
FUTURE OF NATIONS
This book introduces the concept of the network state: a country you can start from your computer, a state that recruits like a startup, a nation built from the internet rather than disrupted by it.
The fundamental concept behind the network state is to assemble a digital community and organize it to crowdfund physical territory. But that territory is not in one place — it’s spread around the world, fully decentralized, hooked together by the internet for a common cause, much like Google’s offices or Bitcoin’s miners. And because every citizen has opted in, it’s a model for 100% democracy rather than the minimum threshold of consent modeled by 51% democracies.
Technology has enabled us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. But can we use it to start new cities, or even new countries? This book explains how to build the successor to the nation state, a concept we call the network state.
FE Take: Balaji is a bold thinker and while his ideas can seem insane to some, they’re usually prescient.
FUTURE OF WATER
The book stretches from the Big Bang to our future path.
Gleick’s first age covers how water shaped the planet and later how it shaped the lives of early humans. The second age encompasses advancing civilizations like the Greeks and Romans and continues into our own lifetimes. This includes the advent of aqueducts and dams, deadly waterborne diseases, scientific and technological breakthroughs, and “replumb[ing] the entire planet” — what Gleick calls the “hard path.” The third age is what lies ahead, and Gleick presents a “soft path” that takes humanity on a less perilous course than where we’re currently headed.
FE Take: Water has shaped the course of human history. It’s vital to our very existence. Yet most of us have no understanding of this precious resource. This book will change that.
FUTURE OF THE PLANET
Pricing the Priceless: The Financial Transformation to Value the Planet, Solve the Climate Crisis, and Protect Our Most Precious Assets by Paula DiPerna
Prices play an indispensable role in guiding any complex and decentralized economy. But how can they work if the most valuable things of all — the atmosphere, oceans and wildlife that protect, feed and delight us — remain unpriced?
This is the challenge addressed by DiPerna’s book. Money must be made and compensation paid in return for preserving, not destroying, these uniquely valuable resources. A market economy that fails to do this cannot deliver genuine prosperity.
FE Take: A must-read if you care about our planet and creating an economic system that does not destroy it.
FUTURE OF LIFE
Just 45 years ago, the age of gene modification was born. Researchers could create glow-in-the-dark mice, farmyard animals producing drugs in their milk, and vitamin-enhanced rice that could prevent half a million people going blind every year.
But now GM is rapidly being supplanted by a new system called CRISPR or ‘gene editing’. Using this approach, scientists can manipulate the genes of almost any organism with a degree of precision, ease and speed that we could only dream of ten years ago.
But is it ethical to change the genetic material of organisms in a way that might be passed on to future generations? If a person is suffering from a lethal genetic disease, is it even more unethical to deny them this option? Who controls the application of this technology, when it makes ‘biohacking’ – perhaps of one’s own genome – a real possibility?
FE Take: A thrilling, at times mind-boggling read. The future of life is stranger than you think, and it’s here. This book gets you caught up with jargon-free writing.
FUTURE OF HAPPINESS
The Future of Happiness: 5 Modern Strategies for Balancing Productivity and Well-Being in the Digital Era by Amy Blankson
Technology, at least in theory, is improving our productivity, efficiency, and communication. The one thing it's not doing is making us happier. We are experiencing historically high levels of depression and dissatisfaction. This book unveils five strategies successful individuals can use, not just to survive—but actually thrive—in the Digital Age:
• Stay Grounded to focus your energy and increase productivity
• Know Thyself through app-driven data to strive toward your potential
• Train Your Brain to develop and sustain an optimistic mindset
• Create a Habitat for Happiness to maximize the spaces where you live, work, and learn
• Be a Conscious Innovator to help make the world a better place
FE Take: Everyone needs to practice happiness. This book is the perfect guide.
AI and the Future of Creative Work by Michael Filimowicz
The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad
Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Dr. Jeremy Bailenson
REAL ESTATE'S NEW WORLD ORDER: How Demographics, Data, and Digitization are transforming investments in the world's largest asset class by Omar Al Kurdi
Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Chris Dixon
The Network State: How to Start a New Country by Balaji Srinivasan
Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future by Peter Gleick
Pricing the Priceless: The Financial Transformation to Value the Planet, Solve the Climate Crisis, and Protect Our Most Precious Assets by Paula DiPerna
Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures by Nessa Carey
The Future of Happiness: 5 Modern Strategies for Balancing Productivity and Well-Being in the Digital Era by Amy Blankson
Leave a comment below and let me know which book sparks your interest.
The Future of Work, Money, Learning, Real Estate, the Internet, Happiness, & More
love this so much! looking forward to reading book on the internet and future of happiness
Every topic is interesting, but I can't read everything.
I prefer subjects that I can practice as an individual and have direct experience with or participate in. I choose 5 and 10. On topic 1 I read another book.