(I've also posted this on Goodreads.)
Radical Evolution is a look at how rapid and fundamental advances in technology could produce enormous changes in human life and even in what we define as "human" in a relatively short time. It's by Joel Garreau, a Washington Post writer who wrote two books I enjoyed immensely: The Nine Nations of North America (about regional differences in and around the U.S.A.) and Edge City (about the new urban landscape of suburban development).
In Radical Evolution he tackles the potentially world-changing effects of what he calls the "GRIN technologies" -- Genetic engineering, Robotics, Information, and Nanotechnology. Any one of those four fields has the potential to change the world, and the four of them have synergistic effects on each other, so that advances in one can spawn other advances in the others, which create still more advances, and so on in a process of asymptotic technological change Garreau calls "The Curve."
We're reaching a point where those four areas of technology have the potential to change humanity in unprecendented ways. Genetic engineering can make us healthier, longer-lived, and smarter. Robotics and information technology holds the promise of giving humans access to almost infinite amounts of information -- and the possibility of artificial intelligences as smart or smarter than ourselves. And nanotechnology lets us reshape the physical world down to the level of individual atoms. How will we deal with these tremendous changes?
Garreau is a member of the Global Business Network, which is a futurist think-tank kind of like a cross between the Bavarian Illuminati and the Justice League. Their specialty is "scenario planning," a method of boiling the infinite possibilities of the future down into a handful of distinct pathways. He applies that technique to transhumanism in Radical Evolution, showing us three possible outcomes which he nicknames "Heaven," "Hell," and "Prevail."
The "Heaven" scenario is obviously the most rosy. All the optimistic predictions about increased lifespan, increased intelligence, and increased wealth come true, and soon. The people reading Garreau's book will live like gods, and their descendants will pretty much be gods. Amen and hosanna.
The "Hell" scenario centers on the kind of dystopia familiar to readers of cyberpunk science fiction. In the future rich people will have all kinds of neat toys and live forever, poor people will be useless in a world of automation, all this new tech will ravage the environment, and in the background superintelligent artificial intelligences will take over the world and prepare to exterminate us.
And finally there's the "Prevail" scenario, which is sort of "Heaven"-lite. We'll only become semi-godlike, there will be some problems along the way, but we'll rise to the occasion and muddle through.
However, one comes away with the strong suspicion that Garreau isn't presenting these three as possible futures, but rather as a kind of Hegelian "thesis -- antithesis -- synthesis." He's stacking the deck in favor of the "Prevail" scenario, and the result is that the book comes across as more of a polemic in favor of transhumanism than an impartial analysis. It lacks the wisecracking skepticism of Ed Regis's Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, an early investigation into some of the same topics. Regis looked at both the visionaries and the crackpots, and wondered aloud if there was any real difference between them.
In addition to the author's obvious axe-grinding, the book is too journalistic. It reads like a very long Sunday feature article. Garreau falls into a pattern: he introduces a topic with some historical references (Thoreau, Bacon, Thomas Kuhn), then interviews some of the modern visionaries in whatever technology field he's talking about. He describes people's offices, usually gives some biographical background including the sort of cod-Freudian "telling detail" which fools the reader into thinking they understand the subject's motives, and provides some punchy quotes. Feature-section editors love quotes and biographical details, and descriptions of offices. In his account of computer scientist Jaron Lanier, Garreau somehow manages to spend more than a page talking about driving around New Mexico drinking in biker bars and eating huevos rancheros. It's fine travel writing, but it's kind of out of place.
And like far too much journalism on technical topics, Garreau stints when talking about the actual nitty-gritty details. He explains Moore's Law well enough, but his depictions of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering feel cursory. Now, Joel Garreau is not a scientist, and one could probably argue that it's better to chase down some of the more technical works in the (extremely useful) "Recommended Reading" section of Radical Evolution rather than depend on the author's ability to explain topics in which he has no personal expertise.
But the book also feels cursory when it delves into the topics Garreau really is something of an expert on: the political, legal, and social issues at stake in his three scenarios. By relying on feature-section quotes from his interview subjects he misses the chance to present their arguments in detail. The result is as insubstantial as a local TV news story: "Here's something which could be very good, or very bad. This person says it will be good [insert clip], this person says it will be bad [insert clip]. Next up: sports and weather!"
Maybe I'm expecting too much. Garreau applied the same personality-driven journalistic approach to his other two books, both of which I enjoyed immensely, and as a study of the people involved in creating the future -- for good or ill -- it's interesting and entertaining. But it could have been so much more.
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