Accelerating Change 2004 :: Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface
 
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Five Hundred Browseworthy Books
on Understanding and Guiding Accelerating Change

If you wish to visit Stanford on Friday (before the 6pm reception at SAP Labs, Palo Alto, 2 miles from campus), you might print out copies of our AC2004 Booklists, linked below.

Then go peruse these fascinating books, all available next to Tresidder Union at Stanford Bookstore (SB), the largest and best academic bookstore on the West Coast. SB will also run a Presenter's Bookstore at AC2004 on Saturday 12-6pm and Sunday 12-4pm, with selected works of our distinguished speakers.

First, visit the Futurist's Bookshelf below to skim our current Top 50 titles we recommend you know about to gain a broad, strategic understanding of accelerating change in the human environment.

Futurist's Bookshelf

Below are additional noteworthy titles in each of our Science, Technology, Business, and Humanist conference dialogs. Together this list comprises 500 particularly insightful works in a wide range of topical interests.

Science Titles

Technology Titles

Business Titles

Humanism Titles

Marcel Proust has said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." ASF's goal is to promote better observation, measurement, understanding and guidance of the accelerations and efficiencies that are constantly emerging in our increasingly technological world.

With better social foresight we learn to distinguish kinds of accelerations that are continually renewed (e.g., computation, process efficiencies) from those that are more periodic (e.g., economy, specific technologies and business models), the kind that we prefer (productivity, connectivity, compassion, security) from those we seek to avoid (zero- and negative-sum disruption, discrimination, nonsustainability).

Both Robert Shiller's Irrational Exuberance and Michael Alexander's Stock Cycles forsaw the post-2000 financial market depression, for example, using compelling independent arguments. Periodic major recorrections are fundamental to any accelerating economy, especially after the initial overpromotion of broadly disruptive new technologies (railroads, automobiles, internet).

SFI Economist Brian Arthur (Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy) notes that the real phase of applied acceleration occurs after the bubble, when more mature and much less expensive infrastructure can be deployed, and the profusion of initial entrants can strongly consolidate into a few strategic survivors. In Clockspeed, MIT management professor Charles Fine discusses the strategic advantage (when benefits can be articulated) of cheaply revamping supply chain and engineering process for acceleration, and many others have written on the impact of ICT on acceleration in the service and knowledge economies.

We have selected these works in an attempt to help you:

1) better understand environmental acceleration (selective scanning, competitive intelligence, strategy) when such understanding matters
2) help build your personal and institutional innovation capacity, and
3) improve personal and institutional resilience/robustness to accelerating change as it occurs.

We hope they help you see existing markets, technologies and social phenomena "with new eyes."

Other titles to suggest? mail{at}accelerating{dot}org.
 

 

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

 

Technology is becoming organic, nature is becoming technologic.

Brian Arthur

 

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley

 

 

Analysis • Forecasting • Action

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