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Title: The Spike : How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies by Damien Broderick ISBN: 0-312-87782-X Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 09 February, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.07 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Well Written Examination of Future Trends
Comment: For anyone interested in where technology is helping to drive the human species and society, The Spike by Damien Broderick is one of the best books to come along so far. Undoubtedly written by someone who readily embraces the positive possibilities for the future of humanity, it nonetheless outlines many of the potential dangers and problems confronting us as exponential change impacts our world over the next few decades. He covers today's major technologies and technological trends in a highly readable and entertaining manner and presents perspectives on our near-future that are reasonable, well documented, and thought provoking. Not science fiction, this book is a valuable and practical contribution to the continuing and creative and very important dialog on where our world is ultimately headed. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: Profiles of an Even Better Future
Comment: This book could be considered an update of Arthur C. Clarke's (yes THE Arthur C. Clarke) landmark 1962 study entitled Profiles of the Future. Dr. Broderick looks at the progress made in the nearly four decades since Profiles, and presents the view from the early 21st century. The two books deal with similar subject matter, but to contrast the works, Clarke's stunning work is entirely focussed on the science and technological advances facing humanity, whereas Broderick takes a rather more broad view, considering some of the consequences of progress, as well as making some fearless specific predictions, such as the ones found on page 87. This book will be one you may take down from your shelf occasionally for the next 40 years, looking up some specific thing you know you read there, then getting sidetracked, like you always did as a child when looking up something in the encyclopedia. (Remember those? We used them before the Web.)
Whereas Clarke is from a space science and engineering background Damien Broderick's art springs from a literary and scientific palatte of colors. The Spike is a book that gains momentum as it goes along, so that it actually seems to have a shape to it, like an upwardly reaching... spike. Buy it, read it, find out where the dedicated futurists think we are heading and what happens when we get there.
Rating: 5
Summary: Science non-fiction that's stranger than fiction.
Comment: I picked this book up because I'm an futurist info-junkie. My expectations were modest, the reviews for this were good, but not stellar. However, after just a handful of pages I was completely hooked (I read this book in a night, a very long, very late night).
Damien Brodericks' book "The Spike" screams for our immediate attention to an impending convergence of a handful of rapidly developing technologies (principally nanotechnology, biotechnology, networking, and Artificial Intelligence), each revolutionary on their own, but combined, transcendental; Broderick calls that convergence "the spike".
The concept alone is worth the read. Seldom do most people consider just where humanity now stands in relation to technology and its utility. Where, for example, transportation technology for all but a few thousand years of almost 3 million was our feet and crude "shoes" that permitted 3 mile per hour travel, then animals, chariots, etc. up until about two hundred years ago where a train could propel people at 20 miles per hour, then, "within living memory of the elderly", cars enabled ever faster travel, then planes, jets, rockets, now technologies allow for video conferencing at light speed. Broderick points out that if you put that progress on a chart, and drew out just the last 300,000 years of mankinds progress in transport speed increases, you'd see a flat line until you get to the furthest edge of the graph, then a near vertical spike.
Cool stuff.
And much cooler when you consider that (in his well reasoned belief) if you were to draw out a graph starting 100 years ago, and ending one hundred years from now, we'd find ourselves right at the very beginnings of an incline into a technological spike that will (barring some catostrophic event) fundamentally re-landscape humans (and what it means to be human) in such a material way, you could argue that we wouldn't really remain human at all...
This is very approachable science, Broderick, unlike many other writers attempting to translate the almost imponderable and ever increasing torrent of science from the frontier, does allot of digesting for us in this book. So, while a Matt Ridley (author of "Genome" and "Nature Via Nurture" among others) might be more inclined to try and fill in more factual basis to cement understanding of a particular science, Broderick casts a justifiably wide net over a whole constellation of different scientific disciplines; and, as a consequence, doesn't go into great detail in giving a full "3D" view of each very interesting technology. This will no-doubt leave some more scientific-minded readers wanting for more in the "basis department". For that class, I'd suggest Ridley, but also writers like Hans Moravec (writer of "Robot"), or Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Age of Spiritual Machines".
"The Spike" offers optimistic and intensly interesting scenarios for the prospect of a better life in the future as well as realistic concerns that we should start to seriously think about. At a time where it seems we are constantly bombarded by nay-saying "gloom and doom" forecasts for the future, this book is a refreshing (but not overly optimistic) glimpse into a future so potentially wild, so potentially different, it seems more like Science Fiction.
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