The book explores the effect of modern technological shifts on human society, showing that technologies are undergoing accelerating qualitative changes that open up new opportunities for personal development and satisfaction of wants and, simultaneously, engender risks associated with growing opportunities of human interference with nature and technogenic stress on the environment. Based on the study of cutting-edge technologies and resulting socioeconomic shifts, Bodrunov's analysis outlines the shape of the civilizational crisis we face. It can only be overcome by founding a new industrial society of the second generation (if we consider the new industrial state described by J. K. Galbraith as the first generation) reliant on knowledge intensive material production and the gradual removal of humans from immediate material production.