Tips for Time Travellers: Visionary Insights into New Technology, Life and the Future by One of the World's Leading Technology Prophets - Tapa dura

Peter Cochrane, the head of the cutting edge research labs at British Telecommunications, is a leading visionary of the digital age. He takes us on a rollicking tour of the technological advances just ahead. This series of monologues - at once provocative, brilliant and funny - give a tantalizing glimpse of a future where the distinction between humans and computers, between carbon and silicon, is rapidly converging. Our microchip enhanced brains will have to find new ways to interface with computers that can replicate human thought processes. Our mechanically augmented bodies will compete for work with sophisticated robots. In Tips for Time Travelers, Cochrane takes us on a wide-ranging expedition that explores what technology has done for (and to) us, why it sometimes falters, and where it will inevitably take us. In the near future we should expect holographic video-conferencing that makes business travel obsolete; a "virus" that acts as a universal translator between computer systems; and other practical applications that will make innumerable small but important changes in the way we live and do business.

After Tips for Time Travelers, readers will never think about technology the same way again. Peter Cockrane, research head at industry pioneer British Telecom, offers an uncensored and sometimes disturbing commentary on how today's dramatic advances in technology will alter the way we live and think. No longer science fiction, recent news-making breakthroughs -- such as human cloning. identification chips implanted under the skin, digitally-enhanced brains and machines that can think -- are becoming a reality that will irrevocably reshape our culture and our lives. The technology is inevitable. Cochrane argues: the only question is whether or not we will embrace it or fear it.