The author
also wrote Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. “Americans are making the
biggest changes in a hundred years in how we build our cities.”
Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of
Enhancing our Minds, our Bodies – What it means to be Human
By Joel Garreau, Doubleday, May 2005, 400 pages, ISBN 0385509650
From Amazon
Editorial Review from
Publishers Weekly
Washington Post reporter Garreau
takes readers on a cross-country trip into the future as he interviews
scientists and other thinkers grappling with the implications of our
newfound—and, to some, frightening—knowledge of the genome. Highlighting what
he calls "the Curve"—the rate of exponential change in
technology—Garreau (Edge City: Life on the
New Frontier) breaks the central part of his book into four
scenarios. In
"Heaven,"
genetic engineering will make us stronger and healthier, help us live longer
and metabolize our food more efficiently. "Hell" resembles the island of Dr. Moreau: science runs amok, we
cripple the genome of our food supplies, and babies are born with unexpected
deformities instead of the improved characteristics promised by gene therapies.
The "Prevail"
scenario might also
be called Muddling Through: even if we make a mistake now and then, we will
figure out how to slow potentially harmful changes and speed up potentially
beneficial ones. Last,
"Transcend" considers
that humans might conquer the difficulties that lie ahead and emerge into a new
age beyond our wildest dreams. Science buffs fascinated by the leading edges of
societal and technological change and readers concerned by the ethical issues
that change presents will find much to ponder in Garreau's nonjudgmental look
into our possible futures Agent, John
Brockman.(On sale May 17)
Editorial Review from Booklist
We are facing "the biggest change in 50,000 years in what it means to be
human," writes Garreau, of the Washington
Post, thanks to the swiftly evolving GRIN technologies, that is, genetic, robotic, information,
and nano. To get a
sense of the possible implications of these paradigm-altering developments, he
speaks with scientists who fall roughly into two opposing mind-sets: those who view technology as a stairway
to a heaven in which humans perfect the body and greatly extend the mind, and
those who see a grimly hellish future in which self-replicating microbes,
nanobots, or "enhanced" humans turn viciously against their creators.
Clarifying and companionable, Garreau explains astonishing discoveries, ponders
just how intimately connected we are to our digital tools, surveys speculative
fiction classics, and profiles such visionaries as heaven-inclined Raymond
Kurzweil, hell-fearing William Joy, and Jaron Lanier, the virtual-reality guru,
who offers a less extreme, more commonsensible vision of the future based on
humankind's muddled but powerful instinct to do the right thing. The
technoscenarios Garreau explicates are riveting, and of acute importance, as is
his reminder that there is much more to life than technology, no matter how
amazing it gets. Donna Seaman
Copyright � American Library Association.
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