X-Message-Number: 11121
From: 
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 09:28:17 EST
Subject: Broderick's better book

Yesterday I posted some comments on Ray Kurzweil's recent book, THE AGE OF
SPIRITUAL MACHINES. Today I want to say a little about a competing book,
Damien Broderick's THE SPIKE, subtitled ACCELERATING INTO THE UNIMAGINABLE
FUTURE, published in 1997 by Reed in Australia.

As writing projects, the two books are very similar, looking at technological
acceleration into the next century and beyond, including computers and
nanotech and their potential effects on human life and thought. 

As to credentials, Kurzweil has the advantage of hands-on personal
contributions to existing technology, with patents etc. Broderick is primarily
a writer in science and science fiction, with over twenty books published as
well as many articles. He has an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in literature and
science from Deakin University. 

But the books must stand on their own, and in my opinion Broderick not only
did it earlier, but did it better. He has more range, more balance, and more
meticulous accuracy. And while Kurzweil is no slouch as a writer, Broderick is
better--more graceful and gifted in language, and just as entertaining. (Of
course, many other writers have dealt with these same topics, some long ago,
but at the moment we are interested in recent works that may have contemporary
impact.)

As one small clue, here are some words that are found in the index of the
Broderick book but not that of the Kurzweil book: ageing, assemblers, Bedford,
Bekenstein Bound, black hole, bogosity, cellular automata, consentives, cosmic
engineering, cyberspace,  cyborg, datavores, demiurge, fuzzy logic,
immortality, longevity, Malthusian, memetic mentalities, Omega Point,
posthuman, transhuman, Searle, selfish genes, STM. To be sure, one could write
a much longer list of words in the Kurzweil index not in Broderick's, but in
the qualitative sense I think Broderick has the advantage.   

One of the tidbits is the discussion of the to-do about the article in
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (April, 1996) by its staff writer, Gary Stix, which did a
snide hatchet job on nanotechnology and Drexler's Foresight Institute.
Drexler, Merkle & Co. struck back with a detailed rebuttal on the Foresight
web site. This included a complete reprint of the Scientific American article,
and that magazine demanded that the rebuttal be removed, hinting at copyright
action. Foresight refused, claiming "fair use" as reaffirmed by the Supreme
Court, and finally the magazine published a semi-retraction of the Stix
article on its own web site.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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