The Spike, by Damien Broderick ★★★★

[mithriltabby]

If you are wondering why people around you are babbling strange words like “transhumanism” and “extropianism” and using a capital S to speak of a Singularity and then opening a university for it, Damien Broderick’s The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies is a good introduction to the field. Broderick looks at the currents of thought centered on the idea that the rate of technological advance is, itself, accelerating, for everything from transport speeds to gene sequencing to Moore’s Law, and speculating on what the world will be like if this acceleration continues.

I’ve been following the discussion for some time, so the book was largely review for me; it was quite nice to see a well-balanced look at the differing viewpoints on what Broderick calls the Spike. He covers the ramifications of molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and human uploading, which may be a wild ride for someone who hasn’t been reading Vinge and Stross and Drexler already. Broderick pays careful attention to the skeptics as well as the gung-ho enthusiasts, and has an opinion similar to mine: we should be devoting a lot of careful thought to these matters now so we’re better able to avoid or solve problems when they come up. He’s a bit more optimistic about the matter than I am; I agree with Broderick that these technologies are well worth pursuing, but I’m with Jamais Cascio: “The Singularity is not a sustainability strategy.”

Any book about the future can go out of date very quickly; this is a 2001 vintage and still holding up fairly well, though there are more recent results in biology that stand out— he has the old estimate of humans having 100,000 genes, and makes no mention of synthetic biology.