Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human
Joel Garreau
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0767915038
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Taking us behind the scenes with today’s foremost researchers and pioneers, bestselling author Joel Garreau shows that we are at a turning point in history. At this moment we are engineering the next stage of human evolution. Through advances in genetic, robotic, information, and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny–and perhaps our very souls. Radical Evolution reveals that the powers of our comic-book superheroes already exist, or are in development in hospitals, labs, and research facilities around the country–from the revved-up reflexes and speed of Spider-Man and Superman, to the enhanced mental acuity and memory capabilities of an advanced species. Over the next fifteen years, Garreau makes clear in this New York Times Book Club premiere selection, these enhancements will become part of our everyday lives. Where will they lead us? To heaven–where technology’s promise to make us smarter, vanquish illness, and extend our lives is the answer to our prayers? Or, as some argue, to hell–where unrestrained technology brings about the ultimate destruction of our species?
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Most boosted items is Preparation H? Go figure.) Wal-Mart loses billions a year to theft. If these chips dramatically reduce this shrinkage, all other retailers will have to compete to lower their costs or die. Retailing is hardly the only arena of competition, although by the middle of the first decade of the new century, eBay was poised to be one of the nation’s 15 largest retailers, with Amazon.com joining the top 40. Small, casually run antique stores are closing because they can’t take the.
Medicine. “This, unfortunately, is no exception.” What happens when such a drug moves from the sick to the healthy with an urgent need to the rest of us who work out only sporadically and with mixed results? Will abdominal six-packs be just a pill away? Similarly, what happens when brain-enhancement procedures are developed to fight Alzheimer’s? Will they also be eagerly embraced by the ambitious? Consider the effects The Curve has had on the arts. The traditional music industry is being gutted.
You could stretch a cable 22,347 miles to a stable point in space. You could then run electromechanical vehicles along it full of people and payloads. What you’d have is a space elevator. Five-hour ride, one-way. Forget those preposterously expensive chemical rockets that haven’t changed much since the 1960s. Forget those painfully fragile landing craft so susceptible to burning up on reentry. This could be the breakthrough to the stars, NASA says. Mind you, that’s the mild version of.
If he tried to touch anything. But Brooks goes much farther than that. “We’re trying to build robots that can repair themselves, that can reproduce (although we’re a long way from self-reproduction), that have metabolism, and that have to go out and seek energy to maintain themselves.” Forget the image of a man in a can. “Our theme phrase is that we’re going to build a robot out of Jello. We don’t really mean we’re actually going to use Jello, but that’s the image we have in our mind. We are.
Problems; Joy in his lonely fashion engages death; Lanier attributes all his subsequent work to finding “the connection I lost.” The thinking of Kurzweil, Joy and Lanier describes a triangle. Lanier’s is not some middle vision between that of Kurzweil and Joy. He is off in an entirely other territory that pokes and prods their technological determinism. Lanier agrees with Kurzweil that it is not tremendously likely that you can stop radical evolution by willing it gone. He agrees with Joy that.