Welcome

Welcome to "Life in Fifty Years" (STS 4304; CRN18019) for spring 2018. Our course is taught through the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.

Course Description

We imagine, and live for, accelerating change—a bright, gleaming future inhabited by our better selves, our improved bodies, and our augmented intellect. Let’s consider the year 2068. Many futurists claim we will inhabit a world born of runaway technological growth, a world of almost incomprehensible change in which an “intelligence explosion” allows the human species to transcend evolution. Even though futurists enjoy notoriously bad track records predicting what will happen, we persist in our faith in the unabated, beneficial progress of science, technology and, perhaps, society. In this class, we will examine how our visions of future progress shape our decisions and our work, and analyze how understanding the interrelation of science, technology, and society allows us to intervene in, and not merely accept, the future.