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These are the ones I have been thinking about most, recently:

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Complexity

1177 B.C.

Sunset Kingdom

Pagans

Guns, germs, and steel deals with the way that humanity's history has been shaped by the flow of resources and information, which I feel is often neglected by people thinking about the future.

Complexity deals with the way that atomized individuals making personal choices end up creating emergent behaviors. With 8 billion people on the planet, understanding those emergent behaviors is going to be crucial to understanding the future. (There are almost certainly more thorough and up-to-date books on this by now. This is just the one I read in high school so it has the most influence on me personally.)

Sunset Kingdom traces modern conspiracism surrounding sinister "Jewish Bankers" and the global apocalypse to pre-Christian, even pre-Roman notions about civilization as the one force that stands between chaos and order in the world.

1177 B.C. deals with the collapse of the Bronze age empires, a situation that I believe is very similar to the modern world in many ways. What's important here is that many of the narratives that we use to talk about the world – empires vs. barbarians – are rooted in this time period and have been passed down with relatively little change.

Lastly The Pagans portrays one of the rarest events in human history: what appears to be a true and dramatic transformation in human thinking, over the course of only a few hundred years.

In my opinion each of these books illuminates forces that shape the future, which futurists often neglect. People who hang out on this forum tend to be excited by new technologies. I know I am. But that means that there is also a technocratic strain that believes that some kind of inflection point, singularity, or other spontaneous transformation is near at hand that will make all of our dreams of the future come true, because the rest of humanity will either recognize the promise of technocracy or get dragged along kicking and screaming.

I sort of agree that there is an inflection point coming, which is why recently I have been studying the only two true such inflection points in history, that I can see.

The first is when humans stopped traveling, became sedentary, and most importantly those sedentary humans began seeing themselves as the "normal" ones, bifurcating human survival strategies in a way that pitched expansionist agricultural societies into inevitable conflict with anybody occupying any land that they wished to convert into their resources.

The second is when massive numbers of people in the centuries around 1 AD, and continuing to this day, began abandoning the notion that time, life, and history are inescapably cyclical, and began embracing the notion that proper belief and behavior could free a person (or an empire) from the cycle.

In both cases, the ideas pre-existed the transformation for centuries, possibly forever. Why did human outlooks shift so dramatically in what appears to be very short periods of time? What idea, currently held by some loony cult, is going to be treated as so obvious in 200 years, as the idea that humans want to live year-round in the same place (except for rich people of course), want to spend their days working instead of foraging, or that we can escape the fate that our eyes tell us is inevitable?

If something like that is in our future, we need to understand how it happened the last time. How did millions of people shift their outlook? How long did it take? What were the transitions like? If population density causes aristocratic imperialism to emerge from human tribal behavior, is it possible that there is some other population threshold where new, more complex behaviors might begin to emerge? And if we don't make it to that threshold, what are the chances that our current state of imperial expansion can continue, for even another half century?

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When I was depressed my friend texted me, 'don't be sad' and that changed my life.

The Gene by Diddhartha Mukherjee.

It mostly covers history but this is what helped me think about humanity can evolve in the future. And in the end he talks about how humans will continue to evolve and what we could be in the future.

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> What idea, currently held by some loony cult, is going to be treated as so obvious in 200 years

a world government I guess

I think it's on the table. It definitely seems unworkable now, but when there are 10 billion people still dealing with the fallout of climate change 100 years after the generations that primarily benefited from that exploitation are dead, I think things might change.

I don't think we'll have to wait that long for a much bigger support of a World Government. The generation born today will grow up in a World where it doesn't make sense to not have a Worldwide government, so give it 30 years for a whole generation to support it and 60 years before the majority of the population support it.

David Deutsch - Beginning of Infinity, The Fabric of Reality

On why the current state of "AI" is nonsense. What is "science" and how we should approach it.

21 Rules for the 21st Century actually changed how I live my life in today and tomorrows world.

Buckminster Fuller: Utopia or Oblivion, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

1177 is interesting. It is also near the beginning of the Iron Age and all those mythical magical gift from the gods weapons sound like meteoric iron to me.

Renewable energy seems to be highly local, started with roof top solar in some places. If you can make your power locally your local economy benefits. Then we get vertical farms that will eventually feed everyone on the planet, and in space. Then we toss in 3D printing so that most stuff gets made locally...

I see a return to city states being the dominant political/economic entities for a while.

Wright's Law. Changed the way I decide if an emerging tech is viable.

I'm a graduate student at the University of Houston's M.S in Foresight program where they provide seminal books, ideas, and thinkers about the futures studies and foresight. I've completed 7/10 classes so I've got a high level understanding on the big ones.

The most influential book I've read so far was Richard Slaughter's The Biggest Wakeup Call in History. He names what the greatest civilizational challenge humanity faces. Spoiler: “humanity has become a global force in its own right but is still thinking and behaving as if it lived on a world without limits that can continue to absorb impacts and insults of all kinds without consequence.” The idea is that if society understands what is at stake, the prospects for dealing with the “civilizational challenge” is greatly improved.

Slaughter combines theory and framework like 2x2, Integral theory, worldviews, and spiral dynamics to map out paths to plausible, aspirational futures. One that at worst suggests a descent rather than a collapse. Where if we shift our priority from economic and technological investment towards cognitive and social investment, we can develop a society that can accept difference to move forward.

The book exemplifies the importance of applying foresight theory in creating novel insights and hope for the future when things only seem to get worse. If I can spend my life playing a part to translate and transform individuals in their pursuits, I can die fulfilled in a collapse scenario.