This is a collection of eighteen essays that came out of a 2001 ACM conference. The subjects centered around the future of computers in our lives, but some discussed robotics, bioscience, astrophysics and oceanography. Several focused on ubiquity or "ambient intelligence" as one author called it. Written by some leading minds in science, information technology and others, the essays discuss future challenges and possible scenarios in their respective fields.
While a few of the papers leaned to the pretentious or the superficial in their commentary, overall I found the essays to be informative and well written. The learned cast of writers included the likes of Michael Dertouzos (Director of the MIT Computer Science Lab), Alan Kay (a founder of Xerox PARC), Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet, WYSIWYG interface), John Seely Brown (Chief Scientist of Xerox), Rodney Brooks (Director of the AI Lab at MIT), Vint Cerf and Ray Kurzweil,. Most papers had a good list of references for further reading.