Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human

by Joel Garreau

Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press (Management of Innovation and Change Series), 1997. ISBN: 0-875-84585-1.

  Why well-run companies—specifically the well-run ones—are particularly susceptible to being destroyed by upstart outfits hitching their wagon to new and disruptive technologies. The message is to make your own best products obsolete with innovative ones before the competition can.

  Drucker, Peter. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. ISBN: 0-060-15428-4.

  America’s most respected management guru preaches that innovation consists of the purposeful and organized search for change and the opportunities such change might offer economically and socially.

  “FUTUREdition”: http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/products_services/ futuredition.html or sign up for a free subscription at: http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/futuredition/index.html#SUBSCRIBE

  A free electronic newsletter edited by John L. Petersen of The Arlington Institute that offers a very useful scan of readings on the frontiers of science, technology, media, geopolitics, the environment, and social perspectives.

  “Future Survey: A Monthly Abstract of Books, Articles, and Reports Concerning Forecasts, Trends, and Ideas About the Future, a World Future Society Publication,” Michael Marien, editor. Monthly newsletter from: World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Ave., Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA. www.wfs.org/fs

  A spectacularly useful overview of all the good new books and articles on topics addressed in this book and many others. A monumental achievement. I don’t know how Marien does it.

  Gleick, James. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. New York: Pantheon, 1999. ISBN: 0-679-40837-1.

  Hanson, Robin. “Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence.” http://hanson.gmu.edu/aigrow.pdf

  ———. “Is a Singularity Just Around the Corner?” In Journal of Transhumanism, April 10, 1998. http://www.transhumanist.com/volume2/singularity.htm

  ———. Hanson’s Web site: http://hanson.gmu.edu/home.html

  Hanson is that unlikely combination, an economist who thinks about The Singularity. As he says, “I am addicted to ‘viewquakes,’ insights which dramatically change my worldview.”

  Ilkka, Tuomi. “The Lives and Death of Moore’s Law.” In First Monday, Vol. 7, Number 11, November 2002. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/

  ———. “Kurzweil, Moore, and Accelerating Change.” Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, working paper, August 27, 2003. http://www.jrc.es/~tuomiil/articles/Kurzweil.pdf

  Tuomi contends that Moore’s Law has been subject to both cultural overstatements and bad data. He proposes that processor innovation is not supply driven but results from users of information technology being able to innovate new social uses for semiconductors faster than engineers have been able to develop improved technology. Tuomi sees the potential for stunning productivity increases through the intelligent use of technology, but argues that the future of semiconductors finally is determined by social innovation.

  “Interesting-People,” aka “Farber’s List.” Archives at http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

  An e-mail list run by David J. Farber, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, that pushes to you a vast quantity of whatever Farber thinks is interesting on any subject on his mind. If you can handle the sheer volume, you will find addressed many subjects related to The Curve and all sorts of other things. I don’t know many of the digerati who don’t belong to this list. To subscribe, send a note to dave@farber.net telling him who you are and why you want to be included.

  Kash, Don E. Perpetual Innovation: The New World of Competition. New York: Basic Books, 1989. ISBN: 0-465-05533-8.

  Particularly useful is its account of the World War II origins of the most dramatic rise of The Curve.

  “KurzweilAI.net”: http://www.kurzweilai.net/

  This is an extremely useful and professionally maintained site. Its most valuable feature is at the bottom of the splash page where it says “Enter your address to subscribe to our news.” If you do, every weekday morning at around 6:15 A.M. U.S. Eastern, you get a well-edited digest of important, useful and balanced reports from highly respectable sources, which over time will cause you to be hard-pressed to think that The Curve isn’t real.

  Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press, fourth edition, 1995. ISBN: 0-02-874074-2.

  The classic 1962 work, including research dating to before World War II, on how innovation enters the mainstream.

  Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. First published 1970. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. ISBN: 0-553-27737-5.

  ———. The Third Wave. New York: William Morrow, 1980. ISBN: 0-688-03597-3.

  Two of those rare books about the future that look better the older they get.

  Vinge, Vernor. Address to NASA Vision-21 Symposium, March 30–31, 1993. Downloadable from http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html or http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html

  Vinge’s original paper on The Singularity.

  The GRIN Technologies: Genetic

  Davies, Kevin. Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-801-87140-9.

  Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. ISBN: 0-198-57519-X.

  ———. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. ISBN: 0-393-02216-1.

  Elliott, Carl. Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream. New York: Norton, 2003. ISBN: 0-393-05201-X.

  Entine, Jon. “The coming of the über-athlete.” In Salon.com, March 21, 2002. http://www.salon.com/news/sports/2002/03/21/genes/ index_np.html

  Disruptive change usually can be most clearly seen wherever there is the greatest competition. In this case, sports. See also Sokolove, below.

  Hall, Stephen S. Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. ISBN: 0-618-09524-1.

  Heinberg, Richard. Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1999. ISBN: 0-8356-0772-0.

  Judson, Horace Freeland. The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. Plainview, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, expanded edition, 1996. ISBN: 0879694785.

  Lightman, Alan, ed., et al., Living with the Genie: Essays on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery. Washington: Island Press, 2003. ISBN: 1-55963-419-7.

  McGee, Glenn. Beyond Genetics: Putting the Power of DNA to Work in Your Life. New York: William Morrow, 2003. ISBN: 0-060-00800-8.

  Pollack, Robert. Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA. New York: Mariner Books, reprint edition, 1995. ASIN: 0-395-73530-0.

  From a protégé of James Watson.

  Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. ISBN: 0-060-19497-9.

  ———. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Perennial, 2003. ISBN: 0-060-55657-9.

  Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. New York: Knopf, 2004. ISBN: 0-375-40629-8.

  Silver, Lee M. Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World. New York: Avon Books, 1997. ISBN: 0-380-97494-0.

  Sokolove, Michael. “In Pursuit of Doped Excellence: The Lab Animal.” In The New York Times Magazine, January 18, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/magazine/18SPORTS.html?pagewanted=print&position=

  Stock, Gregory, and John Campbell, eds. Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0-195-13302-1.

  Watson, James. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of
DNA. New York: Atheneum, 1968; New York: Touchstone, 2001. ISBN: 0. 432163X

  The GRIN Technologies: Robotic

  Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. New York: Gnome Press, 1950; New York: Spectra, 1991. ISBN: 0-553-29438-5.

  The origin of “The Three Laws of Robotics,” which anticipate built creatures capable of moral reasoning.

  Brooks, Rodney A. “The Relationship Between Matter and Life.” In Nature, January 8, 2001, 409:409–11. http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/lbr/lm/2001/nature.pdf

  ———. Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. New York: Pantheon, 2002. ISBN: 0-375-42079-7.

  From the director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who is also chairman and chief technical officer of iRobot, the company that brought to market Roomba—America’s first cheap, practical, sweeping and vacuuming robot.

  Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-262-03240-6.

  ———. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-195-14866-5.

  The argument that we have already crossed the line to being a blend of mind and machine. Resistance is futile, as the saying goes.

  Cohen, John. Human Robots in Myth and Science. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1967. ASIN: B0007OOGSM.

  Dennett, Daniel C. Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-262-04166-9.

  ———. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991. ISBN: 0-316-18065-3.

  ———. Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, 1996. ISBN: 0-465-07350-6.

  ———. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. ISBN: 0-684-80290-2.

  Dennett is a provocative, not always successful, but highly ambitious and much-debated thinker about consciousness who argues it arises from means echoed by information technology, suggesting that consciousness could be created.

  McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. Wellesley, MA: AK Peters Ltd., second revised edition, 2004. ISBN: 1-568-81205-1.

  Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. ISBN: 0-671-60740-5.

  A highly original and controversial view of the nature of intelligence from a godfather of artificial intelligence.

  ———. “Will Robots Inherit the Earth?” In Scientific American, October 1994, 271:86–91. http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html

  Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. ISBN: 0-674-57616-0.

  ———. Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0-195-11630-5.

  ———. His Web site for “Mere Machine”: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/

  From the grand old man of robotics.

  Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. ISBN: 0-198-51973-7; Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-192-86198-0.

  ———. Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-198-53978-9.

  Those interested in creating machines that think inevitably wind up interested in how we might create machines that at least appear conscious—capable of self-awareness and personhood. Penrose’s argument is that the problem with trying to create such machines is that in humans, such consciousness is a quantum artifact, difficult and maybe impossible to replicate in our creations. His position is hugely controversial and deeply intriguing.

  Searle, John R. The Mystery of Consciousness. New York: New York Review of Books, 1997. ISBN: 0-940-32206-4.

  ———. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ISBN: 0-262-19321-3.

  ———. “Minds, Brains and Programs.” In Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980, 3(3): 417–457. http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/MindsBrainsPrograms.html

  ———. “The Myth of the Computer.” In New York Review of Books, April 29, 1982. http://www.nybooks.com/authors/369

  Searle is an eloquent and outspoken critic of the notion that all a computer needs to achieve consciousness is sufficiently enormous processing power.

  Walter, William Grey. “An Imitation of Life.” In Scientific American, May, 1950, 182(5): 42–45.

  ———. “A Machine That Learns.” In Scientific American, August, 1951, 185(5): 60–63.

  ———. The Living Brain. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1953. ASIN: B0006DDBTS.

  Wood, Gaby. Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. London: Faber & Faber, 2002. ISBN: 0-571-17879-0.

  The GRIN Technologies: Information

  Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

  Berners-Lee, Timothy. Weaving the Web. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. ISBN: 0-062-51586-1.

  Tim Berners-Lee is the sainted creator of the World Wide Web.

  Brand, Stewart. II Cybernetic Frontiers. New York: Random House, 1974. ISBN: 0-394-49283-8.

  ———. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987. ISBN: 0-140-09701-5.

  Brate, Adam. Technomanifestos: Visions from the Information Revolutionaries. New York: Texere, 2002. ISBN: 1-587-99103-9.

  You would think such a collection of musty writings could not be engrossing reading, but you would be wrong. The creators of our world, who were not only technologists but humanists, reveal what they thought they were doing at the time.

  Brockman, John. Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite. San Francisco: HardWired, 1996. ISBN: 1-888-86904-6.

  Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” In Endless Horizons, Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1975. First published in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945. Available online at http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm or http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/mark/material/notes/Chap1/VBushArticle/

  In this landmark work, the wartime Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development proffers the stunning idea that in the peace, science should seek to amplify man’s mind, the way a trip-hammer amplifies his fist.

  Castells, Manuel. The Information Age, vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996. ISBN: 1-557-86616-3.

  ———. The Information Age, vol. 2, The Power of Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. ISBN: 1-557-86873-5.

  ———. The Information Age, vol. 3, End of Millennium. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. ISBN: 1-557-86871-9.

  These three volumes are towering, magisterial works on the intersection of information technology and society.

  Gershenfeld, Neil. When Things Start to Think. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999. ISBN: 0-8050-5874-5.

  Gibson, William. Neuromancer: Remembering Tomorrow. New York: Ace Books, 1984. ISBN: 0-441-56959-5.

  Gibson is arguably his generation’s foremost future writer. This, his most revered work, is the one that gave birth to the phrase “cyberspace.” I am also fond of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, in which a terrible villain who somehow sports my name makes an exceedingly brief appearance, Idoru, and especially Pattern Recognition.

  Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. ISBN: 0-684-81201-0.

  Hillis, W. Daniel. Pattern on the Stone. New York: Perseus Books Group, 1999. ISBN: 0-465-02596-X.

  A remarkably engaging and short explanation of computers by the pioneer of the massively parallel ones.

  Hiltzik, Michael. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperBusiness, 1999. ISBN: 0-887-30891-0.

  Licklide
r, J.C.R., and Robert Taylor. “Computer as a Communications Device.” Archives, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1968.

  ———. Libraries of the Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. ISBN: 026212016X.

  ———. “The Truly SAGE System, or, Toward a Man-Machine System for Thinking.” NAS-ARDC Special Study, Archives, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1957.

  ———. “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” In IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, HFE-1, (March 1960): 4–11. http://memexorg/licklider.html.

  ———. “Man-Computer Symbiosis: Part of the Oral Report of the 1958 NAS-ARDC Special Study, presented on behalf of the Committee on the Roles of Men in Future Air Force Systems,” November 20–21, 1958.

  Founding documents of the merger of mind and machine, from the director of command-and-control research for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA’s ancestral organization.

  Torvalds, Linus, and David Diamond. Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. New York: HarperBusiness, 2001. ISBN: 0-066-62072-4.

  From the inventor of the Linux operating system and the open-source movement, the latter of which may indeed be revolutionary if it changes how we create biology.