Friedman David D. Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an UncertainWorld

Cambridge University Press, 2008. — 359 p.Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known; freedom or slavery; effective immortality or the elimination of our species; radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.
David D. Friedman is Professor of Law at Santa Clara University, California. After receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of Chicago, he switched fields to economics and taught at Virginia Polytechnic University, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Los Angeles, Tulane University, the University of Chicago, and Santa Clara University. A professional interest in the economic analysis of law led to positions at the law schools of the University of Chicago and Cornell and thereafter to his present position, where he developed the course on legal issues of the twenty-first century that led to his writing Future Imperfect.
Professor Friedman’s first book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a RadicalCapitalism,was published in1973, remains in print, andis considered a libertarian classic. He wrote Price Theory: An Intermediate Text (1986), Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (1996), and Law’s Order: An Economic Account (2000). His first work of fiction, Harald, was published in 2006.
Professor Friedman’s scientific interest in the future is long-standing. The Cypherpunks, an online group responsible for much early thinking about the implications of encryption, included The Machinery of Freedom on their list of recommended readings. Professor Friedman’s web page, www.davidfriedman.com, averages more than 3,000 visitors a day and his blog, Ideas, at http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com receives about 400 daily visits.