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Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human |  | Author: Joel Garreau
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $16.99
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Seller: bloozbooks
Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 51161
Media: Paperback
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 1
ISBN: 0767915038
Dewey Decimal Number: 303
EAN: 9780767915038
ASIN: 0767915038
Publication Date: May 9, 2006
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Product Description
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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Showing reviews 1-5 of 38
 Good Predition of Three Possible Futures That Won't Be July 27, 2005
John Matlock (Winnemucca, NV)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
I first read Mr. Garreau's previous book "The Nine Nations of North America." At the time I was trying to decide where I wanted to live. He pegged me like an entomologist peggs a bug with a pin to it's place in the collection. (If you're curious, I found my home in the Big Empty.)
Then his next book Edge Cities, about the definition of new and growning centers of culture, business, etc around the edge of the Big Cities that have become too big, too crime ridden, too expensive again helped define what I was looking for.
Now he's done this one on what the future may hold. He investigates a lot of leading edge scientific projects and examines what the future may be like if they truly come to pass bringing the 'benefit' that they promise. He then ties these into three senarios that he calls Heaven, Hell and Prevail.
His descriptions of where science may be going is great. His forecasts of the future remind me of the old saying that 'Predicting the future is easy, it's being right that's difficult.'
Whatever the future holds, it won't be as forecast. It'll be something different. Perhaps, indeed, almost certainly it will contain elements of all three senarios Mr. Garreau is describing. But it will also have big changes forced on it by the every increasing shortage of oil. The AIDS pandemic is just getting a good start, and so far at least I don't see any immediate end. Warfare is changing with al-Qaida on the one hand and the nuclear aspirations of North Korea and Iran.
This book is a great attempt at laying out one direction the world can go, it's worth reading for that alone. Just keep an open mind.
The future of human nature? a preliminary view? June 14, 2005
Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel)
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
To my mind this book is about the most important subject mankind has on its agenda , that subject is the very nature of humanity itself, what it is , and what we should strive to make it to be. Because of the remarkable developments in several different areas of scientific and technological research Mankind is now facing kinds of decisions that it has never faced before. In this present work Joel Garreau talks to a wide variety of key researchers and thinkers and tries to understand the shape the human future might take, or rather be made into. He proposes a number of different scenarios, one called Heaven involves enhanced, 'perfect' human beings living forever in perpetual happiness. The second called Hell involves one or many of the Technologies getting out of hand, and Mankind perhaps through creation of hungry little nanobeings being eaten up by one of its own laboratory productions. The third scenario which Garreau calls ' prevailing ' involves Mankind somehow contending with both positives and negatives and emerging strengthened if transformed in incredible ways, and going on the development of its history and interaction with the Cosmos.
It is important to note that Garreau is not predicting anything with certainty , telling us in Hegelian, Marxian or any other ideological terms what the future and Mankind must be . He very much gives a sense of an incredible mix of alternatives whose outcomes are uncertain. He does however suggest a principle that whatever can happen will happen, and that the future will somehow contain a mix of all the alternatives taken together.
My own feeling is at the moment anyway slightly less than euphoric. It is not simply that the nuclear nonproliferation treaty is as I write this about to be broken open by North Korea and Iran's going openly nuclear. It is not simply that is that we are to face a greater danger from nuclear disaster than we faced even at the time of the cold war, when there were only two sides. That is one element. The development of a fanatic radical Islam whose religion is totalitarian closed- minded terrorism and whose aim is to dominate the world, is another major human development not considered in this book. Another one as another Amazon reviewer has pointed out is the rapidly accelerating fossil fuel crisis facing mankind as a whole, and the widening poverty- gap given by globalization. In other words these radical technological developments are occurring in a world in which there is increasing geopolitical chaos.
The ' old mankind' is in this very much alive , and ready I am sure to make use of whatever destructive technologies ' the new mankind' can provide to possibly enslave us all.
Genetics, robotics, information technology, nanotechnology ,all these are that is, not developing in a vacuum. And mankind which is in such great disorder now may go into ' the next phase of its evolution ' dragging along with it a mass of people who will make the transition to a brave new world of lesser significance.
All this is to say that when Ray Kurzweil's mind becomes a computer chip and an immortal machine the rest of us may still be suffering from various physical and nervous disorders including the Depression which so many researchers say is increasing dramatically in our own time. It appears that the more perfect the future becomes for a few of us, the worse it is for many of the rest.
I very much want to read this book more deeply as I know there is a great deal of information , and perspective I have missed.
I must admit however , that I have a certain skeptical relation to promises of perfect futures , especially when I have such a strong sense not only of the conflicts between good and evil, but between ideal ends and ' human goods ' themselves.
In other words whatever will be ten or twenty or fifty or five hundred years from now we must hope that the ' ruling creatures' of this earth and surrounding regions use their own God - given freedom and power of decision to enhance truth , goodness and beauty , eternal values.
Whether that is possible, whether what I am saying even makes sense or will make sense , I can't be sure.
For now anyway I am going off to ' davven Minchah' ( pray the afternoon prayer of Judaism) i.e. Whatever our condition and however we push our own power I believe that we will still need the appeal to a Transcendent Power to make our lives ultimately meaningful and fulfilling.
An Uncertain Future Ahead May 24, 2005
Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
13 out of 18 found this review helpful
Joel Garreau's provocative new book, RADICAL EVOLUTION, begins with a thought experiment. Sometime in the future, your young daughter returns from her first year at law school. She comes home talking not about torts or civil procedure or the Rule in Shelley's Case, but about her classmates. And these classmates, as it turns out, are a bit different. Many of them have been, in some way or another, "enhanced." She ticks off the various ways that the enhancement takes effect --- internal wireless modems that download any piece of information needed directly into the brain, something akin to telepathy, self-healing, and (at least in theory) immortality in its own self.
Garreau uses this thought experiment to ask the serious questions about the coming revolutions in genetics and technology that are radically changing human evolution --- and whether such radical changes are beneficial or possibly ultimately harmful to the very idea of humanity itself. My question is more basic: why are all these smart, talented, "enhanced" people choosing to go to law school?
Garreau doesn't answer that one (as well he might not). Instead, he makes the point that if anyone in the real world really had these sort of powers, we would actually have a referent for it in the pages of Marvel Comics, in the person of Captain America. Garreau visits the super-secret defense laboratories of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where they're working on super-suits that could do for the soldiers of the future what Captain America got with an exposure to "vita-rays." And since the most well-known product from DARPA research is this Internet on which you are reading this very book review at this very moment, it's a good bet that at least some of the gee-whiz technologies they're working on will pay off, and pay off big.
The best and most intriguing parts of RADICAL EVOLUTION are the parts about laboratories and the people who work in them, and the different applications that the new genetic and nanotechnology scientists are coming up with. The research --- which is either promising or horrifying, depending on your point of view of any given issue --- is compelling and important, and could change our world forever. There's no one better than Joel Garreau to explain this.
Garreau is an underappreciated national treasure. His first two books were landmarks in their fields. THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA is more timely now than it was when it was published in the early 1980s; it does more to explain the so-called "red state/blue state" divide than pretty much all the political commentary written since the 2000 election. And EDGE CITY described the ongoing revolution in city and suburban planning. RADICAL EVOLUTION purports to do the same for the technologies that promise to change our bodies, our genomes, and possibly even our nature as human beings.
That RADICAL EVOLUTION doesn't quite meet the gold standard of Garreau's earlier works may have more to do with the unsettled nature of the technology than anything else. Both NINE NATIONS and EDGE CITY had to do, largely, with maps, with tracking the course of the shifting borders between East and West, North and South, downtown and suburbia. There aren't any maps to speak of with the emerging technologies --- or if they are, they're of the fragmented, medieval variety. Here there be monsters.
Garreau's work is divided into different scenarios. One that he calls "Heaven" is largely the vision of Ray Kurzweil, one of the founders of modern assistive technology. (About half of the technologies discussed in RADICAL EVOLUTION are designed to be assistive technologies to help make people with disabilities more independent.) Kurzweil imagines a future where the positive aspects of the new technology are available freely to everyone, allowing each of us to customize our own selves to the point where immortality --- or complete spiritual freedom from the body, if that's what you want --- is more than a promise or a legend or a fable. Countering Kurzweil's vision are the prophets of doom, led by Silicon Valley pioneer Bill Joy, who worry that unrestricted experimentation with self-replicating nanobots could result in the entire planet --- you, me, and everything around us, right down to the core --- turned into food for invisible, ravenous robots. This "grey goo" nightmare is cataloged by Garreau in his "Hell" scenario, along with other dystopias of the "Brave New World" variety.
C.S. Lewis wrote that the greatest evil "is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lit offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices." This is almost entirely the environment in which RADICAL EVOLUTION takes place, in the laboratories, in the offices, in the academies. We do
not, as of yet, know the nature of these technologies or what they will do for us --- or to us. The promise is that they will help us, cure us, or possibly even assist us in transforming into something beautiful and splendid. The danger is that they will destroy us totally or take away some of that which makes us human.
Garreau brings up two other scenarios --- "Prevail" and "Transcend," which posit that there will be a struggle in dealing with the new technologies, but that the worst of the "Hell" scenarios can be avoided. But there is no way, now, to know which of these scenarios will win out. Perhaps the most frightening thing about the impact of these new technologies is that they leave Garreau --- one of the brightest, most perceptive people out there --- not knowing what will happen next. RADICAL EVOLUTION, if it does nothing else, helps us realize that there's a lot left to understand, and an uncertain future ahead.
--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds
A Book for the SciFi Inspired to the Technologically Challenged May 7, 2007
FuturesStudent (USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Reading Radical Evolution is like reading a "How to" column - you are always surprised what can really be done. The book opens with a number of mind boggling bits of research talking about things from telekinesis to a device that gives soldiers x-ray vision; the funny thing is that these things are really occurring in laboratories as we speak. The purpose of the book is to provide an understandable, digested version of the work that is happening in Futuring land. Futuring, for those who are not in the know, is simply the study of trends and projections in an effort to forecast the future. Much like a meteorologist predicts the weather, futurists attempt to predict the social, political, technological, and economic climate 50 to 100 to a 1,000 years in advance. The book tries to stay neutral, explaining the possible horrors and terrors of advancing technology, but it clear from the first page to the back cover that its author, Joel Garreau, is a big supporter of advancements in technologies. Beyond the first couple examples, he goes further to describing how technologies can affect every bit of our being. Surveying the thoughts and opinions of numerous, credible futurists, he talks about how little robots can allow us to live in to our 200 hundreds and how we may have space colonies on the moon before we know it. The title, Radical Evolution, comes from the idea that through these advancements in technology, we, as humans, are creating a radical chain of evolution that is pushing past any boundaries that nature had set for us. It is even argued that we are actually transcending our humanity through these changes.
In the middle of the book he presents a point/counter-point discussion of the future technology, appropriately labeled "Heaven" and "Hell"; the greatest possible outcomes pinned against the most devastating consequences force the reader to ponder the benefits of new technology. As a compromise, Garreau offers a scenario in which humans simply prevail, this is neither a scenario of humanities grandeur or it's defeat, but rather a median between both extremes. Finally, Garreau admits the limited view that even the greatest researchers have in terms of looking at the future. People can make predictions to their hearts content, but in the end chance happenings and unplanned events can transform the course of any one prediction. All that any futurist can do is take the best information available and make a thorough forecast off with that data, supporting the argument until the next trend arrives.
Dense exploration of the technological explosion to come September 27, 2008
Dennis Littrell (SoCal)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is about the so-called GRIN technologies: Genetic, Robotic, Information, and Nano. Properly speaking the title should be "Extreme Cultural Evolution," or perhaps "Accelerated Technological Evolution." "Radical" is used here in the sense of "extreme." Regardless of what we call it, for better or for worse, we will be enhancing our minds and bodies and changing the life forms around us, especially those we use for food. In fact we have already done so through computers, surgery, artificial limbs, genetically engineer agricultural products, etc. The difference to come is all about the acceleration of change coming from these technologies.
What happens when your daughter's brave new genetic endowment gives her a prodigious memory and makes her smarter, prettier, and stronger than you? No problem. We love our children. Ah, but what happens when she realizes that at age eighteen she is like an Australopithecus creature compared to the new genetic and nanotechnological enhancements bestowed upon her classmates just a few years younger?
What happens is the end of the world as we know it, and most critically the end of human beings as we know ourselves. The question is, is this is a good thing or a bad thing?
Joel Garreau has several answers in terms of scenarios of the future. There is the "Heaven Scenario," the "Hell Scenario," the "Prevail Scenario," and the "Transcend" possibility. Garreau interviewed a number of experts in many fields in an effort to find out not only what the prospects are, but to count noses, so to speak, and see who's optimistic and who isn't.
Put Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999)--see my review on Amazon--in the camp of those who see marvelous things happening, in fact a glorious singularity of advancement. Put Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in the camp of those who believe we are headed for a right awful hell on earth. And put polymath Jaron Lanier in the camp of those who think we can prevail over our creations. And put Michael Goldblatt of the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the platoon of happy warriors just having fun with the prospect of new and more amazingly advanced weaponry (or defenses from weaponry).
After reading this dense and fascinating book I have a few observations. First, regardless of whether we like it or not, or whether Luddites and social conservatives manage to slow down or even halt some of the research, nothing but nothing is going to stem the tide, or alter The Curve, as Garreau calls the shape of things to come. If we don't do stem cell research or explore replicating nanobots, you can be sure that somebody else--in Korea, in China, in Russia, even in Pakistan--will. Any nation or culture that chooses to not explore these brave new worlds will be in danger of not only being left behind economically and militarily, but in grave danger of living a sub existence like that of pets or zoo animals.
There is some debate about this point. Garreau explores the idea that nothing will stop the tsunami and does find some people who think we can put up a wall or at least quiet the rampaging waters. Still others are asking, why should we? Think-tanker Francis Fukuyama, author of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002)--see my review at Amazon--believes there is something precious in humans as presently constituted. He is fearful that we will lose that human nature through biological engineering. Personally, glancing at the history of human kind, I think that human nature could use some altering, and indeed believe that unless human nature does change, we won't be around much longer. Fukuyama believes that, were we to become as immortal as the gods, we would stagnate. He "doesn't think immortals will ever have a new idea again" and only the death of people allows new ideas to take root. (p. 163)
What if we do conquer all and end up with this so-called heaven on earth? What will it consist of? Will we pursue endless delights from brain chemistry? Are we creatures ruled by the gods of pleasure and pain, or is there some transcendental aspect to us? Garreau explores this question near the end of the book with help from Martin E.P. Seligman's three levels of happiness: "the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life." Here I think Garreau, along with Seligman is whistling Dixie in the dark. The "meaningful life" is what? According to what I could gather on pages 261-262, the "meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are." Seligman finds such attachment in various activities from raising children to saving the whales to being a terrorist. I think a more lasting attachment may be to something like exploring the cosmos.
But would humans really have sufficient desire to do that? Recalling some famous dystopias from literature, H.G. Wells's The Time Machine or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, for example, I suspect that creatures such as ourselves (as currently constituted) can only exist in environments not that far removed from the savannah. Cities are tough enough for the couch potato obese of the Western world. If we gain everything our biology desires, we may become (further) degenerate and fall victim to something untoward and unpredictable. Or we may just end up examining our navels as the perfect mixture of chemicals courses through our bodies. If we conquer all and have no challenges left, what will we do? What does a perfectly satisfied and perfectly serene creature do? We don't know. Transcend human nature perhaps?
Showing reviews 1-5 of 38
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