Despite all of society's advances, our problems proliferate. Wars abound, environmental degradation accelerates,
economies topple overnight, and pandemics such as AIDS and tuberculosis continue to spread. The Internet and other
media help to disseminate knowledge, but they've also created an "info-glut" and left us too little time
to process it. What's more, advances in technology have made the world so bewilderingly fast-paced and complex
that fewer people are able even to grasp the problems, let alone generate solutions. That space between the problems
that arise and our ability to solve them is "the ingenuity gap," and as we careen towards an increasingly
harried and hectic future, the gap seems only to widen.
As he explores the possible consequences of this gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon offers an absorbing assessment of the
state of the world and our ability to fix it. Culling from an astounding array of fields -- from economics to evolution,
political science to paleontology, computers to communications -- he integrates his vast knowledge into an accessible
and engaging argument. This is a book with profound implications for everyone that we can ill afford to ignore.