The Future of the World Is Open examines the work and thought of three prominent Italian feminist philosophers, Lea Melandri, Luisa Muraro, and Adriana Cavarero, as it delves into the significant experiences that shaped them, highlighting their converging and diverging positions. Also appearing here for the first time in English translation are three essays by renowned author, journalist, and political figure Rossana Rossanda. Rossanda's essays offer a critical perspective on some of the contentious theoretical nodes with which Italian feminist thought has wrestled. Written in terse and engaging language, this book explores challenging philosophical and political questions, with themes including masculine domination; the body as the site of sedimented lived experience; sexual difference; the symbolic; the imaginary; feminine political authority; feminine subjectivity; and material humanism. A vivid picture of the socio-political context of Italian feminism emerges—illuminating its strong commitment to practice—and informing and enriching contemporary discussions at the intersection of different disciplinary perspectives.

Writers including Vannevar Bush and Herbert A. Simon discuss the impact of the computer in its first twenty years. Writers discuss the extraordinary growth of the computer in its first twenty years and its use in fields as diverse as medicine and economics, management and physics. Employed in areas once thought to be exclusively the province of the human mind, the computer rendered profound changes in the traditional ways and means of decision making. Contributors C.P. Snow, Walter A. Rosenblith, Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, Herbert A. Simon, Howard W. Johnson, Marvin L. Minsky, Peter Elias, J. C. R. Licklider, Elting E. Morison, Philip M. Morse, Jay W. Forrester, Grace M. Hopper, Alan J. Perlis, John R. Pierce, Robert C. Sprague, Claude E. Shannon, Charles C. Holt, John G. Kemeny, Donald J. Marquis, Gene M. Amdahl, Sidney S. Alexander, Robert M. Fano, and others

A cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity, from Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac—who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.

The Future of the World is devoted to the intriguing field of study which emerged after World War Two, futurism or futurology. Jenny Andersson explains how futurist scholars and researchers imagined the Cold War and post Cold War world and the tools and methods they would use to influence and change that world. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Some argued it should be a closed sphere of science defined by delimited probabilities. They were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. These different forms of prediction laid very different claims to how accurately futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over what was yet to come. The Future of the World carefully examines these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post war period. Using unexplored archival collections, The Future of the World reconstructs the Cold War networks of futurologists and futurists.

The book presents eighteen essays that explore the future from very different perspectives, grouped under five overarching themes: Fundamentals, Science and Technology, The Environment, Global Society, and People. The final chapter details how BBVA is preparing itself for this new reality. The contributing authors are leaders of research and current practice in fields such as nanotechnology, urban design, ecology, demographics, education, and international relations in the globalised world. Presenting their arguments with rigor and objectivity, they reject fatalism and instead affirm their conviction that there is still time to build a better world for future generations.