Books like La Tercera Ola by Alvin Toffler

Walter Isaacson chronicles the minds that forged the digital age, from Ada Lovelace to Larry Page, showing how vision, collaboration, and engineering transformed abstract ideas into the computers, Internet, and technology we use today.

Erik Brynjolfsson explores how digital technologies are reshaping work, productivity, and society—highlighting both the opportunities and the disruptions—and offers strategies for education, collaboration, and policy in the emerging economy.

Kurzweil explores the coming fusion of human minds with advanced machines, predicting that integrated intelligence will surpass current human capacity, shaping future society.

Alvin Toffler forecasts the rapid flood of environmental change in the next thirty years and explores how individuals and societies must adapt, plan, and psychologically adjust to endure the upheavals of modern civilization.

The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls “the specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving. In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”