Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodiesand What It Means to Be Human (ISBN 0-385-50965-0) is a book published in 2005 by Joel Garreau. The promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies -- and what it means to be human. Enter Radical Evolution Blog. Click here to purchase this book from Amazon. Hp Officejet 6500a Windows 8 there. com Ch. 1: Prologue This book can’t begin with the tale of the telekinetic monkey.

• 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. It is here: • On September 29, Joel co-directed an event at The New America Foundation in Washington on how robots are incresingly eating white collar jobs. Scary as hell. As something of an antidote, his colleague Alicia Fremling put together two videos to run while people were gathering.

This is the one that underscores the adage that the street finds its own purpose for any new technology. Epson Fx 2180 Driver For Windows 7 32 Bit on this page. • Say scientists.

They apparently have not studied its ability also to cause it. • “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. • 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. This emergence of complexity from no pattern, “truly is stunning,” says a scientist not involved in the breakthrough. “I never thought that I’d ever see a retina grown in a dish.” • 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.

Right now it is only aimed at rapidly evolving bacteria that are immune to viruses. (A pause-giving thought.

Do we really want bacteria in our gut that can’t be attacked by viruses? Where’s the off switch?) But this process has the potential to rapidly evolve people, as Arthur Caplan, the thoughtful bioethicist at Penn, points out in this article in New Scientist. “If you learn to do this in microbes and then in animals, you’ll find yourself wondering how we got to humans so fast,” he says. “You’ve got to pay attention to what’s going on in lower creatures because that’s the steady march to people.” • The New Yorker has a profile of Jaron Lanier, the poster boy for The Prevail Scenario. It goes into his background in fascinating detail.

• For those of you who just can’t get enough Big Dog videos, check out his new big sib, Alpha Dog. Particularly interesting is the scene at the end where the big bot figures out how to pick himself up after falling down. • This video by Alicia Fremling for the New America event demonstrates once again that even the zeitgeist is subject to immutable delay. —The New York Times Book Review A guide to the big ideas about the future of our species.

The stakes in thinking all this through are enormous. —The Washington Post Book World Today’s the day I blow big sunshine up your ass by telling you I just finished “Radical Evolution” and loved it. Even started taking the VRE to work for more time to read. This, coming from a former PE major and airborne ranger who’s a slow learner anyway. Shit-hot read. —Richard Spearman, DARPA The focus of Garreau’s book is not on the nuts and bolts of the technology itself but rather on what it will all mean for us humans. Garreau is constantly on the lookout for the human story behind the ideas.

—Scientific American Am enthralled. This is the perfect “beach read”. Deserves serious attention for its potential to turn the world upside down and inside out in the relatively near future. Great news: It’s extremely readable! —Tom Peters, tompeters.com One of my favorite cutting-edge thinkers.

—John Tierney, The New York Times An eye-opening exploration of how cutting-edge 21st-century technologies, in embryonic form right now, pose the stark alternatives of a real-life Utopia or Brave New World. Collectively, they could produce ‘the biggest change in 50,000 years in what it means to be human’. Garreau has an eye for the anecdote that throws much of this. Into compelling human terms. —Kirkus Reviews Mr. Garreau is a zesty storyteller, a gonzo futurist who builds alternative universes from solid science, and he’s neither a technology booster nor a Luddite. The questions his moral quandaries raise are among the deepest questions we know how to ask: What kind of creatures are we — the apelike animals from which we evolved, or the angels we imagine we can become?