What Should We Be Worried About?

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I wish to thank Peter Hubbard of HarperCollins for his encouragement. I am also indebted to my agent, Max Brockman, who saw the potential for this book, and, as always, to Sara Lippincott for her thoughtful and meticulous editing.

JOHN BROCKMAN

In 1981, I founded the Reality Club, an attempt to gather together those people exploring the themes of the post–Industrial Age. In 1997, the Reality Club went online, rebranded as Edge. The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers in such areas as evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, cosmology, and physics. Emerging out of these contributions is a new natural philosophy, new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions.

For each of the anniversary editions of Edge, I and a number of Edge stalwarts, including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and George Dyson, get together to plan the annual Edge Question—usually one that comes to one or another of us or our correspondents in the middle of the night. It’s not easy coming up with a question. (As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator, used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?”) We look for questions that inspire unpredictable answers—that provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have.

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