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

by Joel Garreau

  Turing, Alan M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In Mind, October 1950. 59:433–60. The article also appeared in G.F. Luger, ed., Computation and Intelligence: Collected Readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Also available at: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html

  Can machines think? The origins of “The Turing Test” to determine if a machine is displaying intelligence.

  Ullman, Ellen. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997. ISBN: 0-872-86332-8.

  Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. New York: Viking, 2001. ISBN: 0-670-89976-3.

  My favorite history of how we got to the point where we are surrounded by personal information devices. The path was abundantly non-obvious.

  The GRIN Technologies: Nano

  Center for Responsible Nanotechnology newsletter: http://responsiblenanotechnology.org/contact.htm

  Good free newsletter from the Eric Drexler wing of the church.

  Drexler, K. Eric. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. New York: Anchor, 1986. ISBN: 0-385-19972-4.

  ———, and Chris Peterson with Gayle Pergamit. Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution. New York: William Morrow, 1991. ISBN: 0-688-09124-5.

  Eric Drexler is a founding visionary of nanotechnology. Engines of Creation was his seminal work.

  “E-drexler.com.” http://e-drexler.com/

  Feynman, Richard P. “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics.” In The California Institute of Technology’s Engineering and Science, February 1960. http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html

  The paper that began it all.

  Foresight Institute: http://www.foresight.org

  The Foresight Institute, home of the thoughtful and serious Eric Drexler and Christine Peterson, is attempting to prepare society for the overwhelming effects of the “strong” nanotechnology—involving molecular assemblers—that they believe is on the horizon.

  Freitas, Robert A., Jr. Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities. Austin, TX: Landes Bioscience, 1999. ISBN: 1-570-59645-X.

  ———. Nanomedicine, Vol. IIA: Biocompatibility. Austin, TX: Landes Bioscience, 2003. ISBN: 1-570-59700-6.

  ———. Nanomedicine Web site, http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/index.html

  Interesting and very early work at the intersection of biology, nanotechnology and robotics.

  Merkle, Ralph. “Nanotechnology: What Will It Mean?” In IEEE Spectrum Online, September 5, 2004. http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/speakm.html

  ———. Merkle’s home page: http://www.merkle.com/

  The co-inventor of public key cryptography is a pioneering thinker about and cheerleader for nanotechnology. He won the 1998 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for theory, and is a director of Alcor, the cryonics firm that freezes dead people in the belief that someday, when technology has moved sufficiently far along, they can be reanimated and cured of whatever killed them.

  Mulhall, Douglas. Our Molecular Future: How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our World. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002. ISBN: 1-573-92992-1.

  Mulhall refers to these as the GRAIN technologies.

  “National Nanotechnology Initiative”: http://www.nano.gov/

  The home page of the outfit spending your taxpayer dollars to improve “human health, economic well being and national security” through nanotechnology.

  Roco, Mihail C., and William Sims Bainbridge. Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: NSET Workshop Report. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation; National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), Subcommittee on Nanoscale Science, Engineering, and Technology (NSET), March, 2001; and New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. ISBN: 0-792-37178-X. http://www.wtec.org/ loyola/nano/societalimpact/nanosi.pdf

  “Small Times: Big News in Small Tech”: http://www.smalltimes.com/

  “The Smalley Group at Rice University”: http://smalley.rice.edu/

  Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam, 1995. ISBN: 0-553-09609-5.

  Stephenson is one of his generation’s premier writers of future fiction. This work evokes a little girl growing up in a society shaped by nano and other GRIN technologies. I find most of Stephenson’s stuff fascinating (Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, e.g.), but this book probably is the one most accessible to a general readership.

  The Three Human Evolutions: Biological

  Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley: University of California Press, third revised edition, 2003. ISBN: 0-520-23693-9.

  Darwin, Charles. The Works of Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species. New York: New York University Press, sixth edition, 1988. ISBN: 0-814-71805-1.

  Dyson, Freeman J. Origins of Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ISBN: 0-521-30949-2.

  Fortey, Richard. Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth. New York: Knopf, 1998. ISBN: 0-375-40119-9.

  Jerison, Harry J. Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence. New York: Academic Press, 1973. ISBN: 0-123-85250-1.

  Kauffman, Stuart A. The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN: 0-195-05811-9.

  ———. At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York, Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-195-09599-5.

  The spontaneous emergence of that most spectacular self-organization, life itself, through the lens of complexity and chaos theory, by one of its pioneers.

  Leakey, Richard. The Origin of Humankind. New York: Basic Books, 1994. ISBN: 0-465-03135-8.

  Smith, John Maynard, and Eors Szathmary. The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. New York: Oxford University Press, new edition, 2000. ISBN: 0-192-86209-X.

  Wenke, Robert J. Patterns in Prehistory: Mankind’s First Three Million Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. ISBN: 0-195-02556-3.

  Wills, Christopher. Children of Prometheus: The Accelerating Pace of Human Evolution. New York: Perseus Books, 1998. ISBN: 0-738-20003-4.

  The Three Human Evolutions: Cultural

  Copernicus, Nicolaus. On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres. First privately circulated in outline form in 1514 and published in 1543. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books (Great Minds Series), 1995. ISBN: 1-573-92035-5.

  Descartes, René. Six Metaphysical Meditations; Wherein it is Proved that there is a God. And That Mans Mind is really distinct from his Body. London: Benjamin Tooke, 1680. New York: Cambridge University Press, revised edition, 1996. ISBN: 0-521-55818-2.

  “I think, therefore I am.” The rise of Cartesian logic is the point at which many historians mark the hard turn Western civilization made toward the technological and rationalist world in which we live today.

  Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. ISBN: 0-060-18307-1.

  ———. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1997. ISBN: 0-393-03891-2.

  The Pulitzer Prize–winning, best-selling modern author on cultural evolution.

  Eliade, Mircea, Willard J. Trask, trans. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954. Princeton: Princeton University Press, reprint edition, 1971. ISBN: 0-691-01777-8.

  Galilei, Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. New York: Modern Library, 2001. ISBN: 0-375-75766-X.

  Published in Florence in 1632, this work—demonstrating the truth of the Copernican system in which the earth revolves around the sun—was the most proximate cause of Galileo’s trial before the Inquisition. Its influence is incalculable. With a foreword by Albert Einstein.

  Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymou
s History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. New York: Norton, 1969. ASIN: 0-393-00489-9.

  How industrialization split our modes of thinking from our modes of feeling, with ideas about how to bridge that gap.

  Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. London: Andrew Crooke, 1651. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, student edition, 1996. ISBN: 0-521-56797-1.

  At a “time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal,” there is “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

  Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. ISBN: 0-674-17103-9.

  ———. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970, third edition, 1996. ISBN: 0-226-45808-3.

  Kuhn first used the word “paradigm” to suggest that any researchers’ then-current worldviews, institutions, and beliefs will shape any body of research. Hence, these paradigms, or worldview structures, are subject to sharp, discontinuous transformations as new structures are found that describe reality better. These breaks, or “paradigm shifts,” are commonly referred to as scientific or cultural revolutions. The influence of Kuhn’s work has been immense. The acceptance of plate tectonics in the 1960s, for instance, was sped by geologists’ reluctance to be on the wrong side of a paradigm shift.

  Nisbet, Robert A. Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969; reprint edition, 1992. ASIN: 0-195-00042-0.

  Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts—From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers—Came to Be as They Are. New York: Knopf, 1992. ISBN: 0-679-41226-3.

  The process of invention as an artifact of cultural evolution.

  Plato. The Republic. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000. ISBN: 0-486-41121-4.

  What is justice?

  Poundstone, William. Prisoner’s Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb. New York: Doubleday, 1992. ISBN: 0-385-41567-2.

  The development of game theory, which arguably allowed us to survive the Cold War, is one of the most important pieces of cultural co-evolution of the twentieth century.

  Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf, 1998. ISBN: 0-679-45077-7.

  The Three Human Evolutions: Engineered

  Bostrom, Nick. “How Long Before Superintelligence?” First published 1997, revised 1998 and 2000. Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics. http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html

  Dyson, Freeman J. The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0-195-12942-3.

  Dyson, George B. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. ISBN: 0-201-40649-7.

  Engelbart, Douglas C. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA, 1962. http://sloan.stanford.edu/ mousesite/EngelbartPapers/B5_F18_ConceptFrameworkInd.html

  The manifesto of a new discipline, by its founder.

  Gelernter, David. Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox—How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN: 0-195-06812-2.

  ———. The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought. New York: Free Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-029-11602-3.

  Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ISBN: 0226321460.

  Hillis, W. Daniel. “Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior; or, The Songs of Eden.” In Daedalus, Winter 1988. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 117, no.1. Available at http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0463.html?printable=1

  The pioneer of massively parallel computers, thinking about the songs of apes, speculates on how we might learn to build an intelligence.

  Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994. ISBN: 0-201-57793-3.

  McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

  ———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

  ———, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Random House, 1967.

  Mitchell, William J. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-262-13434-9.

  Murphy, Michael. The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Future Evolution of Human Nature. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1992. ISBN: 0874777305, paperback edition.

  Michael Murphy is the cofounder of California’s Esalen Institute, a New Age guru, and a charming and fascinating dinner companion. This is his massive tome on “the transformative capacities of human nature,” focusing on saints, psychics, mystics, geniuses, artists, and the like. I did not find his views about what constitutes evidence useful to my purposes, but your mileage may vary.

  The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center. http://www.thenewatlantis.com

  My favorite journal at the intersection of ethics, politics and technology.

  Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Reality. New York: Summit Books, 1991. ISBN: 0-671-69363-8.

  ———. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. ISBN: 0-201-60870-7.

  ———. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Perseus Books Group, 2002. ISBN: 0-738-20608-3.

  From a pioneering analyst of the impact of information technology on society.

  Roberts, Chalmers M. “The Decision of a Lifetime: In His Twilight, Facing the End on His Terms.” In The Washington Post, August 28, 2004, page A1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40467-2004Aug27.html

  A stunningly lucid and personal discussion of a decision many of us may soon be facing at an even more advanced level—whether or not to pass up Enhancement and embrace death.

  Roco, Mihail C., and William Sims Bainbridge. Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science. Arlington, VA: A National Science Foundation/Department of Commerce sponsored report, June 2002. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. ISBN: 1-402-01254-3.

  An amazing work from government agencies. http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_frontmatter.pdf

  Rose, Michael R. Evolutionary Biology of Aging. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN: 0-195-06133-0.

  Sterling, Bruce. Holy Fire. New York: Bantam, 1996. ISBN: 0-553-09958-2.

  Sterling is another of his generation’s prime writers of future fiction. This book looks at a society in which an aging woman can choose to be forever young. I find much of Sterling’s work rewarding—check out the rollicking Zeitgeist or Heavy Weather, for example. But this is arguably the book most congenial to a general audience.

  Stock, Gregory. Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. ISBN: 0-618-06026-X.

  Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. ISBN: 0-671-46848-0.

  ———. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. ISBN: 0-684-80353-4.

  Not about computers, but about people and how information technology is causing us to reevaluate our identities, engaging in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics
, sex and the self.

  Von Neumann, John. The Computer and the Brain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958, 2000. ISBN: 0-300-08473-0.

  One of the towering geniuses of the computer age looks at how the brain is, and is not, digital.

  Weeks, Linton. “Putting God on Notice: Ready or Not, We’re Taking Control of Our Evolution. Gulp.” In The Washington Post, page F1, February 9, 2003. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39931-2003Feb7?language=printer

  Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1988. ISBN: 0-306-80320-8.

  ———. God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1966. ISBN: 0-262-73011-1.

  The inventor of cybernetics thinks deeply on the implications of what he hath wrought.

  Wolfe, Tom. “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died.” In Hooking Up. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. ISBN: 0374103828. Also: http://www.brainmachines.com/body_wolf.html

  The Heaven Scenario

  Bacon, Sir Francis. New Atlantis. First published in 1627. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/bacon/atlantis.html Also collected in: Ideal Commonwealths: Comprising, More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Campanella’s City of the Sun and Harrinton’s Oceana. Sawtry, England: Dedalus, Ltd., 1989. ISBN: 0-946-62626-X.