Radical Evolution
New Stuff
Paranoid Cyborgs
Okay, that's not a very kind thing to say about our former vice president. After all, even paranoids have real enemies. But it turns out that Dick Cheney -- who has had a lot of technology loaded into his chest to keep him alive -- had his implanted defibrillator's wireless capability disabled lest a terrorist hack it and send him a fatal jolt. Joel wrote once in The Washington Post about how cyborg technology may affect the recipient's psychology and personality, and it included some speculation about Cheney.
Alpha Dog
For those of you who just can't get enough Big Dog videos, check out his new big sib, Alpha Dog.
A Robot Video to Calm Your Nerves About Them Taking Over Soon
This video by Alicia Fremling for the New America event demonstrates once again that even the zeitgeist is subject to immutable delay.
A Real Radical Evolution Machine
George Church, the distinguished geneticist at Harvard, is developing a device that forces lifeforms to evolve in weeks in ways that historically took millennia. It is literally a radical evolution machine.
Amazing Hopping Bot
Watch this bot vault a tall chain link fence topped with triple-strand barbed-wired and imagine what it could do with an Olympic fiberglass pole.
Eyes Grown From Stem Cells
In a test tube, mouse embryonic stem cells self-organized into the most complex part of an eye. If it works in humans, it holds the promise to regenerate damaged or lost eyes.
Seagull Bot
Check out the video of the amazingly lifelike, flapping wing, gliding, indoor/outdoor seagull bot.
A Spy Bot That Can Hide
"Lockheed Martin's approach does include a sort of basic theory of mind, in the sense that the robot makes assumptions about how to act covertly in the presence of humans," says Alan Wagner of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Love Is Better Than Drugs in Reducing Pain
Say scientists. They apparently have not studied its ability also to cause it.
The Genetics of 'Nice'
Siberian researchers have created foxes as tame and friendly as golden retrievers. An amazing accomplishment, given how few wild animals have been successfully domesticated. Especially since this has been done in a relatively short period of selective breeding. Now the question is what does the genome of these creatures tell us about the origins of "niceness" in other creatures, including humans?
What's Being Born: Cooperation
If our challenges are increasing exponentially, and our responses are more or less flat, we're obviously toast. Thus, the Prevailish question is whether there is a second curve -- an increase in bottom-up, flock-like, humanistic responses to our challenges, and whether that curve can be bent upwards. This article, by Greg Ferenstein, suggests that's exactly what we're seeing.
Hummingbird Bot
Check out the video of this newly operational DARPA flying bot designed to resemble a hummingbird. Lots of remarkable things. No tail, it's got enough battery to fly and yet it's that small, transmitting video all the way, including into and out of a building. Imagine what a flock of those could do to your privacy.
What if "Watson" Wins at Jeopardy?
If "Watson" wins the Jeopardy challenge, what does that mean? Will "artificial intelligence" increasingly replace information workers as ATM's displaced tellers? Or will "intelligence augmentation" -- I.A. -- make us exponentially smarter? Probably both, but I'm hoping John Seely Brown is right, "The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them."
How the Egyptian Youth Movement Really Organized Itself
Hats off to David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger of The New York Times for this tick-tock on how the Egyptian youth revolution actually did organize itself.
Entangled Between Past and Future
In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can instantly share a single fate, even when they’re galaxies apart.
The PaleoFuture Blog
Endlessly amusing site about "The Future That Never Was" -- marvelously antique futures that were predicted but never quite worked out that way.
Some Thing to Watch Over Me
Cheap ubiquitous machines can now read your face and behavior better than humans -- registering your emotions, and health -- and enabling super stalking
The Machines Really Are Getting Smart
We have created a rich beastiary of gizmos that actually do approach intelligence. They just are little like the human mind. This report in Wired makes the case.
Why Humans Can No Longer Grasp the Stock Market
Trading algorithms have created an environment so volatile, unpredictable and complex that it is increasingly an alien artifact -- impossible to contain, control, or comprehend, according to this fascinating and scary Wired piece.
Aging Reversed in Mice
Including new growth of the brain and testes, improved fertility, and the return of a lost cognitive function
The Sexual Identity Discussion and Radical Evolution
It says here: "The queer cyborg has developed in opposition to rigid masculine/ feminine doctrines to create hybrid genders: part alien, landscape, sea turtle, pencil holder, the cosmology of our identity extending deeper into the rays of the phantasmagorical World Wide Web. But with radical evolution comes the threat of market takeover.
Stem Cells From Your Own Fat Heal Hearts
The cascade of organs repaired with the patient's own stem cells begins.
The Future of Genetic Information and Health
Sequencing the genome has not produced practical health results as fast as initially hoped. But at Yale recently, Lee Hood, president of the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology, gave a vision of the coming decade in which dramatic price drops in the study of proteins, genes and other pieces of the cell's machinery opens the way to "P4 medicine" -- predictive, preventative, personalized and participatory.
Enhancing Minds -- Or Clouding Them
The Air Force’s 711th Human Performance Wing (this is the first Joel hears of them) is inviting research proposals in a six-year, $49 million neuroscience and biotechnology effort. One suggestion is to use “external stimulant technology to enable the airman to maintain focus on aerospace tasks and to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information.”
Fashion Moves Toward the Radically Evolved
According to the Financial Times: "Part of the reason for the prevalence of the hourglass shape is surgical: the extreme body reconstruction many women have been undergoing, with breast and bottom augmentation, alongside hours of Pilates and yoga, has created a figure as contrived and Barbie-like as bullet bras and waist cinchers (or “waspies”) did 60 years ago.
Fem Bot Pop Star
Check out the video of this robot girl singer/dancer. A generation of young males living in their parents' basement may never be the same.
State of the Art Battle Medicine
In Afghanistan, medevac choppers save wounded soldiers with a fascinating mix of advanced technology like powdered porcelain that advances clotting, and devices nearly as old as war such as tourniquets.
Boobs Take the Lead
In the drive to commercialize stem cells that enhance, heal, or rebuild injured or damaged organs, if you're looking for a mass market, it turns out there is one obvious place to start.
What’s It About
In Radical Evolution, bestselling author Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor for The Washington Post, shows us that we are at an inflection point in history. As you read this, we are engineering the next stage of human evolution. Through advances in genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny--and perhaps our very souls.
Taking us behind the scenes with today's foremost researchers and pioneers, Garreau reveals that the super powers of our comic-book heroes 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, 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 will they lead us, as some argue, to hell--where unrestrained thechnology brings about the ultimate destruction of our entire species? With the help and insights of the gifted thinkers and scientists who are making what has previously been thought of as science fiction a reality, Garreau explores how these developments, in our lifetime, will affect everything from the way we date to the way we work, from how we think and act to how we fall in love. It is a book about what our world is becoming today, not fifty years out. As Garreau cautions, it is only by anticipating the future that we can hope to shape it.
JOEL GARREAU is a student of culture, values, and change. The author of the bestselling Edge City: Life on the New Frontier and The Nine Nations of North America, he is a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, as well as a member of the scenario-planning organization Global Business Network, and has served as a senior fellow at George Mason University and the University of California at Berkeley. He has appeared on such national media as Good Morning America, Today, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC's World News Tonight, and NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. He lives in Broad Run, Virginia.
Chapters
Chapter 1: Prologue: The Future of Human Nature
This book can’t begin with the tale of the telekinetic monkey.
That certainly comes as a surprise. After all, how often does someone writing nonfiction get to lead with a monkey who can move objects with her thoughts?
If you lunge at this opportunity, however, the story comes out all wrong. It sounds like science fiction, for one thing, even though the monkey—a cute little critter named Belle—is completely real and scampering at Duke University.
This gulf between what engineers are actually creating today and what ordinary readers might find believable is significant. It is the first challenge to making sense of this world unfolding before us, in which we face the biggest change in tens of thousands of years in what it means to be human.
This book aims at letting a general audience in on the vast changes that right now are reshaping our selves, our children and our relationships.
Chapter 2: Be All You Can Be
AT A CERTAIN ANGLE, seated behind the dining room table in her ponytail, khaki slacks and pinstriped shirt, Gina Marie Goldblatt does not appear in any way remarkable.
This particular January, she is a college sophomore home for the holidays from the University of Arizona. In Gina’s serious moments, she wants to go on for a master’s degree in business administration and a law degree and someday run her own company. But this week she’s focused on going skiing with her friends for the first time. So finding a good time to visit with her is an experience in teenage time management. “We’re the most last-minute people you’ll ever meet,” she says of her posse’s complicated lives. To find pattern in the way her crowd swarms, it helps to remind yourself that college kids, like the proteins that underlie much of human nature, really are much more organized than a tangle of spaghetti. There is logic in the complexity. Events do work out
Chapter 6: Prevail
IN NEW MEXICO, El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro—
the course of the Rio Grande. Through the clear, dry air from El Paso del Norte toward the Sangre de Cristo—beyond the cotton, chilis and pecans of its fertile plain and below its gliding sandhill cranes—poke abrupt, strange mountain shapes. Spooky, spiky, funky and wild, they are hard not to imagine as Paleozoic reptiles awaiting the incantation that will bring them back to life. In this very ancient place, along this path of dreams, lies a small town called La Mesilla.
Radical Evolution New Stuff
Paranoid Cyborgs
Okay, that's not a very kind thing to say about our former vice president. After all, even paranoids have real enemies. But it turns out that Dick Cheney -- who has had a lot of technology loaded into his chest to keep him alive -- had his implanted defibrillator's wireless capability disabled lest a terrorist hack it and send him a fatal jolt. Joel wrote once in The Washington Post about how cyborg technology may affect the recipient's psychology and personality, and it included some speculation about Cheney.
Alpha Dog
For those of you who just can't get enough Big Dog videos, check out his new big sib, Alpha Dog.
A Robot Video to Calm Your Nerves About Them Taking Over Soon
This video by Alicia Fremling for the New America event demonstrates once again that even the zeitgeist is subject to immutable delay.
Profile of Jaron Lanier
The New Yorker has a profile of Jaron Lanier, the poster boy for The Prevail Scenario. It goes into his background in fascinating detail.
A Real Radical Evolution Machine
George Church, the distinguished geneticist at Harvard, is developing a device that forces lifeforms to evolve in weeks in ways that historically took millennia. It is literally a radical evolution machine.
Amazing Hopping Bot
Watch this bot vault a tall chain link fence topped with triple-strand barbed-wired and imagine what it could do with an Olympic fiberglass pole.
Eyes Grown From Stem Cells
In a test tube, mouse embryonic stem cells self-organized into the most complex part of an eye. If it works in humans, it holds the promise to regenerate damaged or lost eyes.
Seagull Bot
Check out the video of the amazingly lifelike, flapping wing, gliding, indoor/outdoor seagull bot.
A Spy Bot That Can Hide
"Lockheed Martin's approach does include a sort of basic theory of mind, in the sense that the robot makes assumptions about how to act covertly in the presence of humans," says Alan Wagner of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Love Is Better Than Drugs in Reducing Pain
Say scientists. They apparently have not studied its ability also to cause it.
The Genetics of 'Nice'
Siberian researchers have created foxes as tame and friendly as golden retrievers. An amazing accomplishment, given how few wild animals have been successfully domesticated. Especially since this has been done in a relatively short period of selective breeding. Now the question is what does the genome of these creatures tell us about the origins of "niceness" in other creatures, including humans?
Profile of Jaron Lanier
The New Yorker has a profile of Jaron Lanier, the poster boy for The Prevail Scenario. It goes into his background in fascinating detail.