Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Beyond Humanity: Cyberevolution and Future Minds by Gregory S. Paul, Earl Cox ISBN: 1-886801-21-5 Publisher: Charles River Media Pub. Date: October, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (17 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Right about religion, but too much rides on their scenario
Comment: The idea that robots could supplant humanity has been around at least since the 1920's, when Karel Capek anglicized the Czech word "robota" and introduced it into the English language through his play "Rossum's Universal Robots." Lately the idea has taken on new life because of a possibly misplaced emphasis on Moore's Law and the growing power of computer networks. But a couple years ago I read where a real-world robotics engineer joked that if the robots are going to take over, they'd better act quickly because the batteries we give them only last for about a half-hour or so.
Nonetheless, this book covers ground that should be familiar to people who have already been exposed to similar scenarios popularized in books by Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Warwick, Damien Broderick and others. It's pretty much plain-vanilla Transhumanist wishful thinking, though livened up by a discussion of the faults of traditional religious belief systems.
My main problem with it is that Paul and Cox's scenario requires about as many critical assumptions as the Drake Equation to turn out just so. Social acceptance of new technologies isn't as straightforward as the authors assume. Why, for example, don't we have technologically doable videophones (a science-fictional cliché about life in the 21st Century), while we do have those obnoxious and unreliable cellphones everywhere these days? Apart from the technical considerations, the lack of demand for the former suggests that we probably don't value having to confront and interpret one another's body language as much as you would have predicted from the characterization of our species as social primates. For similar reasons, the authors' assumption that most people will readily upload into cyber-bodies can't be substantiated until something like that really becomes available. Although we should have learned by now that there are usually unintended consequences to what we do, I haven't seen evidence for emergent and unforeseen AI-like behavior coming from software written by humans for human purposes. There is nothing analogous to Moore's Law for the evolution of software. And even if there are powerful economic incentives to create software with such behavior, it doesn't necessarily have to happen on a short time scale if it turns out to be really hard.
Paul and Cox are more on target in their discussion of the perverse backwardness of traditional religious worldviews in response to current and foreseeable progress. Christians should realize that something is wrong with their story when virgins can now routinely give birth via modern reproductive medicine, and soon without even genetic contributions from men. When Rush Limbaugh went deaf, he didn't pray to some deity to restore his hearing -- he got a cochlear implant, which seems to be working well enough to save his radio career. Advocates of the creationist "Intelligent Design" theory have a problem they don't even realize yet: Humans are intelligently designing and producing things of ever greater complexity, especially computers, yet they are totally unlike things found in nature. No theist ever thought of attributing to his deity the ability to create a computer, which suggests that humans are able to do things that the postulated deity can't! (That's why bio-engineering is denounced as "playing god," while computer engineering isn't.) As the authors say on page 410, "As much as they may hate to admit it, the religious and the mystical know that science and technology do not just make promises that never quite seem to come to pass, or claim miracles that cannot be separated from illusion. They deliver the goods. They make pretend magic real." When "SciTech" gets to the point where it can reverse human aging and resuscitate "dead" people from cryonic suspension, the whole rationale for religion will be thrown into question. Paul and Cox are a little too hard on Buddhism, however, for Buddhists were way ahead of the curve when they developed the insight centuries ago, now substantiated by modern cognitive neuroscience, that the perception of selfhood is illusory. (However I find it ironic that certain Transhumanists want to deny selfhood to people while attributing it to "spiritual machines"!)
Paul and Cox finally go astray by putting too much of the burden of conquering aging and death on their predicted cyber "future minds." While they emphasize the importance of funding scientific education and research now, so that the breakthrough they are predicting will come sooner and save more human lives, they don't seem to realize that there are plenty of things we can be doing with current human intelligence to improve our survival chances. For one thing, there are some as yet unreported breakthroughs in the cryopreservation of the human brain that could enable people dying now a chance to be resuscitated by future medicine. For another, the genetic mechanisms of aging are quickly being discovered, allowing scientists to design drugs that could give us the anti-aging effects of calorie restriction without some of the drawbacks.
On the whole this book gives an overdetermined version of Transhumanist thinking. Better to read it in conjunction with several others, along with related Web texts, to get a better sense of what Transhumanism is all about.
Rating: 3
Summary: Less Filling
Comment: Earl Cox, who also peddles his magical machine vision on radio talk shows, is selling us a large bill of goods in this book, with exciting but ultimately meaningless statements like "downloading your brain into cyberspace"...etc. A close read of his book from a non-materialistic standpoint reveals major assumptions that simply do not hold up to close scrutiny.
1) First, technology does not just "keep developing" faster and faster in some sort of self generating way. Technology is developed for a particular purpose, to solve a problem, to make thing smaller, faster, etc., and is developed in a specific economic and social environment, within which it has to make sense. Much of the type of intelligent machine that Cox discusses make little sense in these terms, despite the fact that he keeps insisting that technology will develop in directons we can't imagine, wrong, we imagine the direction of technological direction, period. Who is going to pay for all these wonderful machines that we will make?
2) Second, throughout the book there appears to be a simplistic assumption or analogy at work throughout the book: mind/body - software/hardware. It is this analogy that fuels. Mr. Cox seems simplistically enamored of modern technology, and oos and aas constantly about our ability to manipulate the atom, create body parts, characterize the human genome, etc. all while half the world is illiterate and millions die of starvation daily. He seems completely fooled by technolopolist propaganda, i.e., all problems can be solved by technology, technology has the answers, his belief in this is akin to a religious belief. But we have many instances of great scientific and technological "advances" that mostly create greater problems than they solve--has Cox been to some of our uncountable nuclear waste sites, the unhappy reminders of our conquering of the atom, and when will that next nuclear power plant be built? Closer to home, it now appears that cloning produces animals with something less than perfect genetic material, in fact, their survival prospects are pretty bleak. And what about the possibility that our pursuit of technological fixes could lead to the total destruction of the ecosystem, humankind, etc.? Mr. Cox hopes that first we will have built machines that could survive such a catastrophe...
3) Sadly Cox is a total materialist, a position which gives his whole edifice a feeling of unreality from the get go, soul-less as it is. The simple question why do this? Why do that? Comes up frequently. Cox has not more sophisticated answer than, well the technology is there, we will keep devloping it ad infinitum.
4) The kinds of machine derived "improvements" that Cox apotheosizes, faster information processing, tireless ability to monitor and calculate, etc. are only a small fraction of the totality of human expression, development, etc. and are wholly external. The term intelligence is used as if there is one measure of intelligence, when in fact there are many, and machines that we create typically only are able to do a single thing very very well, yes better than we can do it but usually because we wouldnt be suited to do it, it would be boring, etc. not because we can't do it.
5) Cox, not suprisiingly, ignores completely, the real locus of human development, not manipulating the external world, but cultivating the inner world.....
Rating: 5
Summary: An awe inspiring vision of the future!!
Comment: This book will grab you from the first page and take you on a vision of the future where people will never die and where our descendents will be robots that will eventually populate the entire universe. The authors paint a very convincing story of a future which they think is inevitable.
"... these machines will see and feel, care and wonder, not just as well as we do, but far better than we can ever hope to. There will be a world of seemingly magical power in which the collective of super-minds will perform (or will conduct) super-science millions of times faster the we humans." (pg. 8)
"When the winds of change deposit us in the future of our dreams, you can be sure we won't be in Kansas anymore. Humanity, as we know it, will be facing a rapid extinction, not from natural causes...but from a situation of our own making. We will find our niche on Earth crowded out by a better and more competitive organism. Yet this is not the end of humanity, only its physical existence as a biological life form. Mankind will join our newly invented partners. We will download our minds into vessels created by our machine children and, with them, explore the universe." (pg.8)
It is the exponential growth of technology that will make this vision possible as the authors write, "the power of calculation has grown an astounding trillion times in less than 100 years! Over the last 50 years, computer speed has expanded some ten millionfold.." (pg. 201)
"There were few cars in 1920 and millions of them in 1930; there wer few home computers in 1975 and millions of them in 1995, and there will be millions of robots among us in a few decades." (pg. 241). (Robots) "will need humans less and less, and fewer and fewer folks will be able to find work. Imagine a world where humans are competing with hundreds of millions of mobile robots, most of them becoming smarter all the time." (pg. 251)
There is a section on the death of religion towards the end of the book which may disturb some people and probably would have been better off not included. There is also a general belief by the authors that we are probably the only intelligent life forms in the universe which they argue unconvincingly. But these two faults are minor in a book of this length.
Close to 500 pages in length I have read it cover to cover 4 times now and always find something new everytime. You do not have to be a scientific expert in this field to appreciate this masterpeice because the writing style reminds me of watching a good sci fi movie. The only difference is that this is NOT fiction!
If you have children or grandchildren you should definately read this book because it is very possible that they may never die!
 |
Title: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil ISBN: 0140282025 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
 |
Title: Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind by Hans P. Moravec ISBN: 0195136306 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
 |
Title: The Spike : How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies by Damien Broderick ISBN: 031287782X Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 09 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
 |
Title: Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence by Hans P. Moravec ISBN: 0674576187 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1990 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
 |
Title: Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly over the Edge by Ed Regis, Edward Regis ISBN: 0201567512 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1991 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
