Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel

Baroness Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain is very well placed and qualified as a neuroscientist and acclaimed writer (The Private Life of the Brain) to do some serious star-gazing, only what she is looking at is very grounded at the personal level and the here and now. Her wide and informed perspective runs from gadgets and gizmos to terrorism via DNA and the cyberworld. According to our response to such future changes we can be categorised as technophiles, technophobes or cynics according to Susan Greenfield. But as she rightly points out, the main danger is going to be the growing divide between the technologically advanced world and the rest which will, as she says, be the vast majority. The great challenge for the future is how to avoid the descent into a very dangerous schism between a relatively small developed world locked into economic growth to feed its lifestyle and the ever-growing underdeveloped world that will be increasingly excluded by poverty.

Tomorrow's People is a thought-provoking and challenging book. It can be uncomfortable reading especially as it demands that we think about and make personal decisions about these hugely important issues that will increasingly impact on future generations. As Susan Greenfield warns, "the bottom line of this book is that the private ego is the most precious thing we each have, and it is far more vulnerable now than ever before". --Douglas Palmer

In her book, Greenfield warns of the possibility of a bleak future for the majority of the world’s population, somewhat like Fritz Lang’s 1927 cinema classic, Metropolis , if the technologically advanced world doesn’t utilise technology wisely for the benefit of all. Greenfield pictures a future where the march of technology is an unstoppable force with the challenge for humanity how best to adapt to it. She sees the danger of an advanced technological society developing alongside a "vast majority" of the world’s population in the underdeveloped world being left out of the advances of technology with the danger of this vast majority being "exploited and abused in ways more sinister, pervasive and cruelthan even that witnessed by the worst excesses on the colonialist past." Greenfield sees the solution to this unbalance by the use of high technology. One example given is the development of GM modified trees to use as fuel combined with solar energy systems to allow high tech cottage industries to flourish in rural areas, allowing people to remain living in the countryside. Greenfield enthusiastically predicts a future where "all food, whether home-cooked or takeaway or a mere pill, comes from genetically modified produce." A future where all those concerns over GM foods proved unfounded with GM foods the only way to successfully feed the developing world. A world where GM and nanotechnology altered food was superior than natural foods.

As far as concerns over possible health hazards from all this technology, (be it from GM foods, vaccines, new pharmaceutical drugs , telecommunications, etc, etc.) Greenfield sees it as just symptoms of technophobia which is defined as the fear of or aversion to technology, especially computers and high technology. Those concerns she sees as just sensationalist and scare mongering. As for the growing power and intrusion of corporate industrial involvement in science Greenfield sees this as a positive. This can be seen on page 184 where she states:"First, there is a growing need for innovative science in the private sector as companies in high-tech industries, particularly pharmaceutical companies, depend for survival on having novel products in the pipeline." As for future research it will take place in "Universities as well as behind the walls of leviathan pharmaceutical and other high-tech industries…"

Summing up Greenfield’s "Tomorrow’s People" it does present in detail the many novel social challenges facing tomorrow’s people from high technology but totally avoids any mention of the possibility that there may be unintended biological hazards which she conveniently dismisses as just technophobia. Her glowing portrayal of everything high tech and the corporate world’s benevolent role in advancing the coming high-tech world is at odds with ample evidence that the corporate world’s actions is anything but benevolent. Recommended reading here would be "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" by Joel Bakan and "Toxic Sludge is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry" by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.


Very very disappointing   September 27, 2004
 13 out of 13 found this review helpful

I bought this in great excitement, being fascinated by the subject, and a great fan of her "Private Life of the Brain". and began to read ... and I can't remember being quite so disappointed in a purchase in a long time. It is written in the breathless style of a teenage journalist with some space to fill in a techno-journal: this kind of writing went out with Tommorrow's World ca 1975. It is also completely unreferenced within the text, and the key ideas are jumbled in or thrown away in asides.

If you want some good ideas on how things like nano-technology and implanted IT might work out, read Peter F Hamilton or LE Modesitt: they're better researched and better written. Perhaps Baroness Greenfield should have done that first herself.


Misleading title   March 23, 2004
 20 out of 23 found this review helpful

I bought this book because I'm interested in the effect of technology on the individual and society, and the title and summary made it sound interesting. But I was disappointed when I read the book.

The author is a neuroscientist. She's certainly not a political or computer scientist. Her Noddy treatment of politics was surprising even for someone so steeped in their own subject (at one stage she attributes the rise of Fascism in Europe to English gardens - honestly - it's that bad). Her technical knowledge appears to be poor - so several key developments relating to the future of technology are not discussed(for example, she completely omits artificial intelligence).

If you've only got a hammer then everything looks like a nail. So everything in this book is twisted into a discussion on brain-function. Whenever she strays from her domain, the treatment is facile or incoherent.

I struggled to complete this book. Maybe the proof-reader did too since the number of typos increased noticeably in the last few chapters. I like to say something positive about any book I read but I'm struggling to say much good about this one because I got so little out of it. I suppose the fact that I finished it says something. It is readable. Her knowledge of neuroscience is undoubted and the one or two discussions (such as the one on consciousness) were interesting.

But I can't recommend it.