Radical Evolution By Joel Garreau Pdf Reader
RADICAL EVOLUTION The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human. By Joel Garreau. 384 pp. Doubleday. $26.
MORE THAN HUMAN Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. By Ramez Naam. 276 pp. Broadway Books. $24.95.
Download radical evolution or read online books in PDF. In Radical Evolution, bestselling author Joel Garreau. They provide the reader with the conceptual. Summary and reviews of Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau, plus links to a book excerpt from Radical Evolution and author biography of Joel Garreau. In Radical Evolution, bestselling author Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor for the Washington Post, shows us that we are at an inflection point in history. As you read this, we are engineering the next stage of human evolution.
'This book can't begin with the tale of the telekinetic monkey.' So opens Joel Garreau's captivating, occasionally brilliant and often exasperating 'Radical Evolution.' Garreau, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post and the author of the influential work of social demography 'Edge City,' acknowledges his authorial choice is a sacrifice. After all, 'how often does someone writing nonfiction get to lead with a monkey who can move objects with her thoughts?' But to begin his book about the technological enhancement of the human mind and body with this kind of gee-whiz gimmick would send a misleading signal. Garreau makes it clear he's more interested in people than in machines.
Readers will be grateful, since an airless sterility often creeps into books like 'Radical Evolution,' which is focused on the near future. In the next generation or two, Garreau writes, advances in genetics, robotics, information technology and nanotechnology (the science that permits the construction of infinitesimally tiny devices) may allow us to raise our intelligence, refine our bodies and even become immortal -- or they could lead to a ruinous disruption of our individual identities and shared institutions, and if things go really wrong, to the total destruction of humanity.
Unless you've cultivated a taste for the hypothetical, the situations mapped out here, in which computers take over, can become so much numbing science fiction. Wisely, Garreau devotes himself to embedding these unfamiliar technologies in a human context. We meet researchers from the federal government's mysterious Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, now engineering soldiers who don't need sleep and who can stop a wound from bleeding just by thinking about it. We spend time with scientists at a biotechnology firm called Functional Genetics, engaged in research on 'anti-infectives' that could one day make humans invulnerable to AIDS, Alzheimer's and cancer.
Garreau focuses on three camps of thinkers who have paused to contemplate the future. The first espouse what Garreau terms the 'Heaven Scenario.' They believe enhancement technology will allow us to live forever in perfect happiness without pain, more or less. The most vigorous advocate of what one skeptic calls 'techno-exuberance' is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist. 'I'm not planning to die,' Kurzweil announces. Instead, he speculates that humans will one day upload the contents of their brains to a computer and shed their physical bodies altogether.
Set opposite Kurzweil and his buoyancy is Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, whose musings tend toward the apocalyptic. Well known for his dire warnings about the growing power of technology, the misnamed Joy represents what Garreau calls the 'Hell Scenario.' Joy speculates that we may meet an undignified end in 'gray goo,' a scenario in which self-replicating devices designed to improve our bodies and minds instead take on a life of their own, becoming 'too tough, too small and too rapidly spreading to stop.' They may, Joy continues, eventually 'suck everything vital out of all living things, reducing their husks to ashy mud in a matter of days.'
Things really get interesting when Garreau meets up with Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and originator of the concept of virtual reality. Lanier foresees neither nirvana nor apocalypse, but a future in which every technological crisis is met and matched by our own ingenuity and resilience. Garreau christens this the 'Prevail Scenario,' and confesses his personal preference for this vision animated by what he calls his 'faith in human cussedness.' Heaven and hell share the same story line, he writes: 'We are in for revolutionary change; there's not much we can do about it; hang on tight; the end. The Prevail Scenario, if nothing else, has better literary qualities.'
JAMA
Garreau's style often takes the form of a notebook dump, in which he deposits his assorted jottings directly onto the page. Sometimes the results are stultifying, but when the subject has a mind as original as Lanier's, they're enthralling. Lanier's reflections are at once whimsical and serious: What if we could project our thoughts and feelings so that they were instantly visible to others? What if our superintelligent machines are felled by a Windows crash, just as they're about to take over?
Mike Mitka
To read Garreau's dazzling, disorderly book is to be thrust into a bewildering new world, where ambiguity rules and familiar signposts are few. As he observes, 'by the time the future has all its wires carefully tucked away in a nice metal box where you can no longer see the gaffer tape, it is no longer the future.'
Whereas Garreau's portraits make it clear that ideas about the future are always idiosyncratic and subjective, rooted as much in emotional need as in rational analysis, there's no such nuance in Ramez Naam's 'More Than Human.' Naam, a professional technologist who helped develop Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer, is a relentlessly positive pitchman, unburdened by doubt or complexity. But his conception of our enhanced future looks less like Kurzweil's sunny utopia and more like a fluorescent-lighted superstore, in which we roam the aisles selecting from displays of brain implants and anti-aging pills.
To Naam, the technological augmentation of our minds and bodies is not an ethical or philosophical question but just one more consumer choice. Accordingly, his main concern is with governmental interference in the free market for such devices. People should be allowed to make up their own minds about enhancements, Naam argues, since 'millions of individuals weighing costs and benefits have a greater collective intelligence, better collective judgment, than a small number of centralized regulators and controllers.' Never mind that we don't allow citizens' 'collective judgment' to decide which drugs are safe; that's why we have the F.D.A. Expert guidance, based on long-term, large-scale research, would seem even more essential in the case of activities like germline genetic engineering, which permanently changes the genetic code of an individual and all his or her descendants.
Naam's other targets are those who seek to slow or even arrest research on biotechnology. Though these objectors span the ideological spectrum -- from Bill McKibben, the liberal author of 'Enough,' to Leon R. Kass, the conservative chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics -- Naam lumps them all together as curmudgeonly sticks in the mud, 'advocates of the biological status quo.' Yet just one page earlier Naam talks up the wonders of 'keeping people young longer' through science. He seems not to notice that eternal youth -- along with faultless functioning, perpetual fertility and unfailingly pleasant mood -- is its own kind of frozen status quo.
In fact, there's something peculiarly adolescent about the blend of narcissism, self-indulgence and lust for control that appears to motivate this quest to become 'more than human.' Naam's book fails to grapple adequately with the consequences that may follow if, through technology, some of these limits are lifted. In hailing a drug that makes long-married couples feel like newlyweds again, or a neural prosthesis that allows you to 'turn down the volume' on your brain's 'empathy centers,' or gene therapy that bulks up your muscles 'while you're watching television,' Naam and his fellow enhancement boosters seem unwilling to reckon with the fact that the same limits that make life difficult also give it meaning.
Annie Murphy Paul is the author of 'The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves.'