Advances in genetic, robotic, information and nanotechnologies, we are altering. Taking us behind the scenes with today's foremost researchers and pioneers. Welcome to the Global Watch Weekly Report Dear Global Watch Weekly Member In recent years, astonishing technological developments have pushed the frontiers of humanity. Radical Evolution: Review of Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau, plus back-story and other interesting facts about the book. Reader Reviews. The Milk Lady of Bangalore.

• Joel Garreau Model

RADICAL EVOLUTION The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means to Be Human. By Joel Garreau. MORE THAN HUMAN Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. By Ramez Naam. Broadway Books. 'This book can't begin with the tale of the telekinetic monkey.' So opens Joel Garreau's captivating, occasionally brilliant and often exasperating 'Radical Evolution.'

Garreau, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post and the author of the influential work of social demography 'Edge City,' acknowledges his authorial choice is a sacrifice. After all, 'how often does someone writing nonfiction get to lead with a monkey who can move objects with her thoughts?' But to begin his book about the technological enhancement of the human mind and body with this kind of gee-whiz gimmick would send a misleading signal. Garreau makes it clear he's more interested in people than in machines. Readers will be grateful, since an airless sterility often creeps into books like 'Radical Evolution,' which is focused on the near future. In the next generation or two, Garreau writes, advances in genetics, robotics, information technology and nanotechnology (the science that permits the construction of infinitesimally tiny devices) may allow us to raise our intelligence, refine our bodies and even become immortal - or they could lead to a ruinous disruption of our individual identities and shared institutions, and if things go really wrong, to the total destruction of humanity. Advertisement Unless you've cultivated a taste for the hypothetical, the situations mapped out here, in which computers take over, can become so much numbing science fiction.

Wisely, Garreau devotes himself to embedding these unfamiliar technologies in a human context. We meet researchers from the federal government's mysterious Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, now engineering soldiers who don't need sleep and who can stop a wound from bleeding just by thinking about it. We spend time with scientists at a biotechnology firm called Functional Genetics, engaged in research on 'anti-infectives' that could one day make humans invulnerable to AIDS, Alzheimer's and cancer.

Garreau focuses on three camps of thinkers who have paused to contemplate the future. The first espouse what Garreau terms the 'Heaven Scenario.' They believe enhancement technology will allow us to live forever in perfect happiness without pain, more or less. The most vigorous advocate of what one skeptic calls 'techno-exuberance' is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist. 'I'm not planning to die,' Kurzweil announces.

Instead, he speculates that humans will one day upload the contents of their brains to a computer and shed their physical bodies altogether. Set opposite Kurzweil and his buoyancy is Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, whose musings tend toward the apocalyptic.

Well known for his dire warnings about the growing power of technology, the misnamed Joy represents what Garreau calls the 'Hell Scenario.' Joy speculates that we may meet an undignified end in 'gray goo,' a scenario in which self-replicating devices designed to improve our bodies and minds instead take on a life of their own, becoming 'too tough, too small and too rapidly spreading to stop.' They may, Joy continues, eventually 'suck everything vital out of all living things, reducing their husks to ashy mud in a matter of days.' Things really get interesting when Garreau meets up with Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and originator of the concept of virtual reality.

Lanier foresees neither nirvana nor apocalypse, but a future in which every technological crisis is met and matched by our own ingenuity and resilience. Garreau christens this the 'Prevail Scenario,' and confesses his personal preference for this vision animated by what he calls his 'faith in human cussedness.' Heaven and hell share the same story line, he writes: 'We are in for revolutionary change; there's not much we can do about it; hang on tight; the end. The Prevail Scenario, if nothing else, has better literary qualities.' Garreau's style often takes the form of a notebook dump, in which he deposits his assorted jottings directly onto the page. Sometimes the results are stultifying, but when the subject has a mind as original as Lanier's, they're enthralling.

Lanier's reflections are at once whimsical and serious: What if we could project our thoughts and feelings so that they were instantly visible to others? What if our superintelligent machines are felled by a Windows crash, just as they're about to take over? To read Garreau's dazzling, disorderly book is to be thrust into a bewildering new world, where ambiguity rules and familiar signposts are few. As he observes, 'by the time the future has all its wires carefully tucked away in a nice metal box where you can no longer see the gaffer tape, it is no longer the future.' Whereas Garreau's portraits make it clear that ideas about the future are always idiosyncratic and subjective, rooted as much in emotional need as in rational analysis, there's no such nuance in Ramez Naam's 'More Than Human.' Naam, a professional technologist who helped develop Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer, is a relentlessly positive pitchman, unburdened by doubt or complexity. But his conception of our enhanced future looks less like Kurzweil's sunny utopia and more like a fluorescent-lighted superstore, in which we roam the aisles selecting from displays of brain implants and anti-aging pills.

To Naam, the technological augmentation of our minds and bodies is not an ethical or philosophical question but just one more consumer choice. Accordingly, his main concern is with governmental interference in the free market for such devices. People should be allowed to make up their own minds about enhancements, Naam argues, since 'millions of individuals weighing costs and benefits have a greater collective intelligence, better collective judgment, than a small number of centralized regulators and controllers.' Never mind that we don't allow citizens' 'collective judgment' to decide which drugs are safe; that's why we have the F.D.A. Expert guidance, based on long-term, large-scale research, would seem even more essential in the case of activities like germline genetic engineering, which permanently changes the genetic code of an individual and all his or her descendants. Naam's other targets are those who seek to slow or even arrest research on biotechnology.

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Though these objectors span the ideological spectrum - from Bill McKibben, the liberal author of 'Enough,' to Leon R. Kass, the conservative chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics - Naam lumps them all together as curmudgeonly sticks in the mud, 'advocates of the biological status quo.' Yet just one page earlier Naam talks up the wonders of 'keeping people young longer' through science. He seems not to notice that eternal youth - along with faultless functioning, perpetual fertility and unfailingly pleasant mood - is its own kind of frozen status quo. In fact, there's something peculiarly adolescent about the blend of narcissism, self-indulgence and lust for control that appears to motivate this quest to become 'more than human.' Naam's book fails to grapple adequately with the consequences that may follow if, through technology, some of these limits are lifted. In hailing a drug that makes long-married couples feel like newlyweds again, or a neural prosthesis that allows you to 'turn down the volume' on your brain's 'empathy centers,' or gene therapy that bulks up your muscles 'while you're watching television,' Naam and his fellow enhancement boosters seem unwilling to reckon with the fact that the same limits that make life difficult also give it meaning.

One afternoon last fall, I was preparing for a parent-faculty meeting and chatting with the novelist Adrienne Garreau, whose husband Joel was working on a new book. I had greatly enjoyed Joel's Edge City the year before, so I asked her when the new book would be out and what it was titled. 'Soon,' she replied, 'and we have not decided on a title yet.' Flippantly, I offered to suggest one if she would let me read a draft of the book and, to my surprise, she agreed, dropping off a sheath of papers on a cardboard box later that afternoon. My students the next day might well have wished she hadn't, because what I thought would be a leisurely perusal quickly transformed into a late-night compulsive read. My classes the next day were shoddily prepared, and I only just managed to pull myself away from the manuscript at the last minute. I started emailing title suggestions that within hours, but as I progressed I realized that my first reactions were too simplistic, not taking into account the shifts in the book's development, so I sent retractions and revisions, which were in turn retracted hours later.

When I finished, I immediately passed the draft on to a friend, who thanked me while explaining that with exams coming up and a new novel to teach, he probably would not get to it for a few weeks. 'Just read the first chapter,' I implored. Two days later, he wanted to talk about the entire book over dinner. Radical Evolution evoked a similar reaction from my book club, a group of men who meet monthly for a meal and an often raucous discussion. Given the book's futuristic emphasis, it seemed appropriate to read it before publication, either on computer screens or PDF files, and so with Joel's generous consent and my urging, we paired it with Brave New World, a novel that eerily predicts many of the all-too-real advances Joel discusses.

We never really got to Brave New World that evening, though, because we all found it hard to exhaust Radical Evolution. There was so much to say, to wonder, to debate. I never helped much with the title, probably because there is so much here that is so rich that any attempt to sum it up in a pithy phrase seems to do the book an injustice, though Radical Evolution is far better than anything I generated. Indeed, the motivating question of the book is what it means for human beings as a species to take control of their minds and bodies: whether we are approaching a utopian era in which we will determine our own destinies, whether we will spin out of control and be struck down for our hubris in playing God, or whether we are entering a more complex and multi-layered era of negotiation between our basic human nature and our power to manipulate our lives.

Of course, our species has always been distinguished by our ability to control; what Joel Garreau has succeeded in communicating so clearly is how the stakes change as this manipulation shifts from an outside environment to what we think of as our inner selves. It is a shift that may not be reversible, one that may set in motion an irreversible series of decisions. The players in this book debate whether this movement leads to Heaven or Hell, but it is in framing this moment as one of choice and in tracing these divergent paths that Radical Evolution creates a consciousness of the pivotal nature of this point in human history. Yet this is just as much a book about people as it is a book about ideas. We meet the visionaries who imagined the internet, virtual reality, the World Wide Web, the technology of warfare, the possibilities of genetic manipulation, robotics, and nanotechnology, and through their voices we come to understand these technologies in fundamentally human ways.

We see medical advances through the eyes of the severely disabled, and we debate the relative benefits of pharmaceutical wizardry that will offer options, not just to mankind, but to our children in their college years. Joel Garreau takes us back two decades to put predictions for the next twenty years in perspective, introducing this myriad of possibilities as an emerging dimension of our own lives. Real lives 2007 game. Radical Evolution becomes a deeply personal book, and one that is undeniably important as well as compulsively engaging.

Joel Garreau reveals what future generations will clearly see as the truly meaningful questions of our time, far more significant than the petty issues that continually call for our attention. So if you have not yet started, find a comfortable chair, preferably one not surrounded by blinking green LED lights, and settle in. I am sure you will sleep just fine, and you can take all the time you want. Just read the first chapter. Huntington Lyman, Ph.D. Radical Evolution concerns people as much as technology, and discusses some of the ways that these new technological developments will change how we work, date, interact and live our lives.

Can you think of other ways that the technologies discussed in the book may impact and change our world?. The fable of the peasant's wish dramatically illustrates the power of a curve that rises exponentially (47). How likely do you think it is that technological progress and power will continue to advance according to Moore's Law? What technological obstacles or human decisions might eventually slow this curve? What are the implications if there is no end in sight?.

A 1943 report by Ryan and Gross classifies people as Innovators, Early Adaptors, the Early Majority, the Later Majority, and Laggards (60-61). Which are you?

Do you have a predictable reaction to innovations, or does it vary? How likely are you to embrace some of the new capabilities discussed in the book that will be available to us in the next fifteen years?. Radical Evolution presents a menu of possibilities quickly evolving into reality, including our ability to block pain, to regrow amputated limbs, to improve memory, to function on far less sleep, to live well past 100, and to significantly enhance athletic ability. Which of these enhancements might you make for yourself? Are there extreme circumstances in which your choice might be different?

Perhaps most importantly, which of these options would you accept or deny for your children and grandchildren?. Throughout the book, Garreau puts into perspective the changes we have witnessed in our own lifetime, listing events that seem like ancient history that occurred only 25 years ago (65-66). What have been the most significant innovations in your lifetime, and how have they changed your life in ways you would not have dreamed back in 1990? Have these changes ultimately improved or degraded the quality of your life?. The acronym GRIN stands for genetics, robotics, information and nanotechnology. Which of these do you think has the most potential for radically transforming our lives in the foreseeable future?

Which do you think have the least potential to radically transform our lives?. Ray Kurzweil, known for his uncanny accuracy, makes a series of predictions about the future (97-105), and forecasting of the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Commerce is summarized in a list (113-114). Which of these predictions do you see as most likely? Do any of them seem absurd, exaggerated, or doubtful? In what small ways are we seeing some of these predications coming true now?.

The changes and advances discussed in Radical Evolution have the potential to act as social levelers or as dividers of people. One vision of the future sees future generations as divided into the Enhanced, the Naturals, and The Rest (157). Do you see technology as uniting or dividing us in the future?. The Heaven Scenario (130) and the Hell Scenario (185) share many assumptions but come to opposite conclusions. What premises do both accept, and what are the critical differences in determining what sort of future we are creating?.

Jaron Lanier proposes, 'even if technology is advancing along an exponential curve, that does not mean humans cannot creatively shape the impact of human nature and society in largely unpredictable ways' (206). What, in practical terms, does this mean to you? What sort of human reaction might humans have towards the possibilities that technology will offer us in the near future?. Garreau offers the phenomenon of cell phone 'swarming' as an example of a creative reaction to a technological innovation. Can you think of other examples of unexpected adaptations to a new technology, particularly ones that struck you as creative and original responses?. Perhaps the most important and dramatic example of the human capacity for consciously resisting what once seemed inevitable is the absence of an exchange of nuclear weapons since the conclusion of World War II. Is this an aberration or an indicator of a human ability to limit technology when it threatens what is fundamental to our species' existence?.

Clearly, Garreau inclines towards the Prevail Scenario. Is this wishful thinking, or the most reasonable prediction? Which scenario ultimately seems most convincing to you, and why? Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Broadway Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.