​WASTED

How We Squander Time, Money, and Natural Resources and What We Can Do About It

We live in a world full of waste in many forms, from fast fashion to wasted time and potential. Yet when most people think of waste, they only think of the tangible, like plastic straws and garbage strewn across sidewalks. In WASTED (6/1/2021), Byron Reese and Scott Hoffman provide an insightful exploration of a ubiquitous issue, and encourage readers to think more critically about waste in all of its manifestations—seen and unseen—and how to reduce it to improve our cultural, economic, and environmental wellbeing.

WASTED is a fascinating series of extensively researched—and often counterintuitive—pieces on waste in our lives. It affects the Earth we live on, the businesses we run, the products we buy, and the lives we live. Reese and Hoffman delve deep into the ways science, businesses, and human behavior create different forms of waste, and how a deeper understanding can lead us toward a world with far less waste—or no waste at all. Along the way, they raise questions from the quotidian to the abstract including.

• Do humans really inhale or consume an average of 100,000 pieces of plastic per year?
• How are the Dutch able to grow tomatoes with 19% of the water and 3% of the chemicals used in US agricultural production?
• Why is it 80 percent of donated clothes end up in landfills and the apparel industry’s emissions are roughly triple that of the entire aviation industry?
• Could global hunger be completely eliminated for the annual cost of about a hundred $100 billion dollars, a sum just under what we collectively spend on pet food? Yes it could.

Ultimately, the question of reducing waste is philosophical and complex. While Reese and Hoffman don’t promise easy answers or shame readers into thinking a perfectly waste-free lifestyle is possible, they promise to help readers understand the questions at play and give actionable steps where they can. As the authors decipher issues they simultaneously provide insights into solutions – mostly technology-driven – that could potentially drive down waste as well. A powerful and compelling thought experiment, WASTED will educate and inspire environmentalists, scientists, business leaders, technologists, and consumers alike.

"The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and the Future of humanity"

A J.P. Morgan 2018 Summer Reading List pick, described as "entertaining and engaging" by The New York Times.

Today we are grappling with big questions around technology: What is possible with artificial intelligence? Should we fear it or welcome it? Will robots take all the jobs, and if they do, would that be a good thing? Can computers achieve consciousness, and if so, do they then acquire rights?"

In "The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and the Future of Humanity," Byron identifies these as fundamentally philosophical, not technical questions, and in doing so, invites the reader to consider these from that vantage point, beginning with the question, “Are humans machines?”

"The Fourth Age" then proceeds to tell the story of technology over the last 100,000 years, focusing on three times in the past when humanity created a technology so profound, says Byron "that it permanently altered our bodies and minds, changing the trajectory of human history in a dramatic way."

Byron has spent the better part of his life exploring the interplay of technology with human history and believes that humanity is about to be so transformed a fourth time, due to artificial intelligence and robots.

"As we progressively 'outsource' our cognitive activity to computers and our physical activity to machines, once again we will be permanently changed, and in this Fourth Age, humanity will embark on the next stage of its evolution," he says.

In captivating and clear language, Byron explores the wide-ranging implications of the Fourth Age as he tackles the questions of artificial general intelligence, employment, automation, creative computers, consciousness, radical life extension, income inequality, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity. He eschews simple dogmatic answers to these complex questions and analyzes the basic assumptions that undergird each one. Thus, "The Fourth Age" doesn’t foist the opinions of the author but offers a framework for understanding how technology and human history come together to create the future.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to move beyond the warring viewpoints of techno-pundits towards a methodology for answering the questions that we now face. Consider it a guidebook to the future that readers can turn to again and again as we rocket towards this fourth species-changing rendezvous with technology.

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and Indie Bound, "The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and the Future of Humanity."

"Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War"

Gloom-and-doom pessimists have it all wrong. This objective look at the trajectory of history, technology, and civilization shows that we are about to enter a great new epoch of human existence, a golden age like we have never seen; a world free of ignorance, disease, poverty, hunger, and war.

With the art of a storyteller, Byron synthesizes history, technology, and sociology into an exciting, fast-moving narrative showing how new technology has had dramatic effects on humanity in the past. He then looks forward at the technological changes we know are coming–from genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and many other fields–and explores how they will vastly increase wealth, prolong our lifespans, redefine human rights, and alter the social fabric of the world.

With a rational and researched optimism, Byron sees the future not as a world in a downward spiral, but as destined for progress beyond our imaginations.