What Is Your Dangerous Idea?

That’s the question posed by the Edge for 2006. And there’s plenty of food for thought provided by 117 thinkers who give their responses in a series of short essays. Lovely stuff.

I find it somewhat depressing, though, at how often the "dangerous" idea is of the form: there is no god/soul/afterlife. That to me is merely the logical conclusion of what scientific evidence points to and I don’t find it dangerous in the slightest. Though to be fair, the sense of danger that is explored by the writers is the sense of how people at large could react at having the crutch of faith kicked away from under them.

I found Sherry Turkle’s piece poignant, and Kai Krause’s piece particularly scary – Stand on Zanzibar, here we are. And Geoffrey Miller posits a terrifying dystopia akin to Atwood’s Handmaid’s tale or the underground society in Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog.

But there’s lots of plums in this feast of ideas – go and pick out a few for yourself!

(hat tip to Norm Geras for the link)