LongNow

Its often aid that capitalism is so deadly to the life-support system of the Earth because it "thinks" only about profit (everything else is relegated to "externalities," which literally do not count) but not well understood and perhaps equally troublesome is that business thunks mostly in terms of the quarterly report. To do anything intelligent we clearly need a longer time horizon. The LongNow Foundation set out to do precisely that It hosts an amazing monthly talk (archives), and is building a ten thousand year clock and re-wilding(bringing back extinct species, and idea pioneered and carried out by UCSC folk). Some important founders are Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, and computer scientist Danny Hillis (who built a computer out of TinkerToys).

Brian Eno's book list:

Seeing Like a State by James C Scott

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams

Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti

The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel

Keeping Together in Time by William McNeill

Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich

Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al

The Face of Battle by John Keegan

A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty

The Notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci

The Confidence Trap by David Runciman

The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein, "is the first in the Knowledge Trilogy that also includes The Creators and The Seekers. The book, subtitled A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself, is the history of human discovery. Discovery in all its many forms are present - exploration, scientific, medical, mathematical and the more theoretical ones such as time, evolution, plate tectonics and relativity. He praises the inventive, human mind and its eternal quest to discover the universe and our place in it."

Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Hrdy

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The Cambridge World History of Food (2-Volume Set) by Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas

The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe by Marjorie Blamey & Christopher Grey Wilson

Printing and the Mind of Man by John Carter & Percy Muir

Peter the Great: His Life and World by Richard Massie

Big History tells the history of the world in eight thresholds, a jump to a higher level of complexity, with unexpected emergent properties, from which there is no going back). It final chapter 13 encourges us to imagine what the next jump will be. This is the secret of Elon Musk, who has made huhe contributions as a designer and entrepreneur because he imagined what was inevitable and caught the wave to that early: electric cars, private sector spaceflight and solar energy.

Try it! Tell us what you think. Are there trends that are converging? Diverging?

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era" James Barrat, video interview). singularity interview (video).