Future Imperfect author David Friedman spoke at the CATO Institute earlier this month. The edited podcast and Book Forum video are now live.

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The full video of the presentation can be found here.

Future Imperfect author David Friedman recently spoke at the Cato Institute in DC. Slate’s William Saletan attended, and he seemed to have enjoyed himself. Anyone who’s watched Friedman lecture will see how entertaining and engaging he can be. Check back soon — I’ll post the audio from Cato once they’ve compiled it.

The Future as We Don’t Know It

By William Saletan (From Slate.com)

I just got back from a talk by David Friedman at the Cato Institute. Fascinating guy, thinks a mile a minute. He must have spat out 100 provocative ideas in his half an hour or so. I can draw you a mental picture of him pretty quickly: bubbly, balding, not much over five feet tall, wears a backpack over his tweed jacket (did I mention the “recreational medievalism“?) . . .

In short, the book covers nearly everything Human Nature covers but with a libertarian bent. Which is sort of my bent, too, except that I’m less theoretically confident than Friedman is–or, to put it the other way, I’m more daunted by practical developments. Three years ago, for example, I wrote a series based on the idea that scientists would try to grow embryos beyond the conventional two-week limit, raising icky possibilities. The scenario made sense to me at the time, but in the three years since, it hasn’t happened. A theorist would say, well, it’ll happen eventually. I’m not so sure. My reaction is: Maybe I was just wrong.

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Future Imperfect author David Friedman was recently interviewed on KCSB Santa Barbara’s The Marketplace of Ideas.

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Lew McCreary, writing for Harvard Business review, recently commented on Future Imperfect.

We want the world to be orderly, but too often it is simply a mess. Friedman, a law professor, gleefully sorts out a host of messes having to do with a wide range of world-changing technologies. For every manifest benefit (say, reducing crime through universal surveillance), there’s a gnarly negative (adios, privacy). Friedman doesn’t duck the big issues: the death of copyright protection; nanotechnology; cloning, genetic engineering, and other advanced reproductive therapies; cognitive enhancement through pharmacology; the growing difficulty (due in part to tools that allow users to veil their identities) of enforcing contracts in cyberspace.

Friedman is honest enough not to claim to be a seer—the future is both imperfect and uncertain. But he frames the possibilities evenhandedly, with energetic comprehensiveness.

A San Francisco Chronicle reporter recently met with Future Imperfect author David Friedman, to speak about the book. The interview appears in today’s Chronicle. Aside from discussing the usual doomsday scenarios, they enter a larger debate about the role of government in private life.

Technology as lens to ponder imperfect future

In a century-old former farmhouse in San Jose, David Friedman is a living paradox who writes about the promise and perils of futuristic technologies even as he collects medieval weapons and other artifacts from the past.

The 63-year-old Friedman, who earned a doctorate in physics but teaches law at Santa Clara University, is the author of a new book, “Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World.”

As the son of the late economist Milton Friedman, he takes a laissez-faire approach to technological advances, arguing that they could lead to a range of outcomes from the beneficial extension of human life spans to the possible extinction of the species.

Rather than try to predict outcomes, he paints the future as a series of coin tosses that will depend on countless private decisions beyond human comprehension or government control.

Speaking recently at an authors’ panel at the Mountain View headquarters of Google, Friedman likened technology to an unstoppable train.

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Future Imperfect author David Friedman talks to Forbes about potentially painful technologies. Future Imperfect is full of ‘em. But it’s not about how to stop it, it’s about how to manage.

Even the most wonderful technology has unintended consequences. And for many technologies, no consequence can be more unintended than this: pain.

And let’s not miss Sadhika’s favorite quote:

How will we live with computers that are smarter than us? We’d better hope they like pets.

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