We hear a lot of promises about the
That’s the question that Zach and Kelly Weinersmith set out to answer in Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, which came out this week from Penguin Random House. Zach is the artist behind the wonderfully nerdy Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics and Kelly is a scientist focusing on parasites. Their book covers a wide range of topics, divided into sections about the universe (asteroid mining, cheap access to space), stuff (synthetic biology, augmented reality) and “you,” (precision medicine, brain-computing interfaces). The chapters explain not only the scientific concepts behind each technology — punctuated with comics, of course — but the economic and political and ethical implications and how our world is about to change.
The Verge spoke to the husband-and-wife team about what parts of reality moved faster than the book, the biggest surprises they found during interviews, and the dangers of trash cans with cookies.
