What will the future bring?
Science writer Mark Stevenson answers this question in four sections dealing with research related to:
1) Extending the human life span;
2) Creating more human machines;
3) Protecting Mother Earth; and
4) The author's specualtions on where all these developments will leave us.
In some cases, the "optimist" in this book's title is merely given lip service. In other cases, "optimist" means giving credence to some research possibilities that may take a long time to yield any fruit (if, honestly ever).
By way of another general point, this book has no photo section which is kind of too bad for many of the interesting gadgets and people he discusses.
But, to the topics:
EXTENDING THE HUMAN LIFE SPAN
This section consists of three chapters discussing the human genome project and research on artificially extending human life.
Perhaps most promising in this area was research by the Harvard School of Medicine which developed a protocol not only for halting aging actually reversing its signs in lab rats.
Here's how they did it. At the tail end of every string of DNA in your body are what is called telomeres. They function sort of like the plastic thing at the end of shoelaces by keeping the code clear of being frayed and damaged. But shoe laces, DNA code does tend to degrade over time. What the Harvard researchers did was to create a substance called telomerase which artificially replaces lost telomeres to extend DNA life span. It allows the DNA to replace itself more times and amazingly actually reverse the aging process.
But the Harvard researchers are not alone. In this book we also meet life extension researcher Aubrey de Grey. de Grey thinks aging is like a disease and he's focused in on seven areas that, if conquered, would actually conquer death itself.
Though this book provides a serviceable treatment of these issues, those wishing a more complete understanding of them are probably best referred to Long for this World which spends a book discussing these issues instead of just a few chapters.
CREATING HUMAN MACHINES
This is one of the two biggest sections in the book.
Wisely it eschews the long discussion of the history of artificial intelligence, focusing only on the emerging developments on its frontiers.
For my money, the most interesting development here is a little robot called Cog developed by Cynthia Breazeal. Going on the idea that humanity is skin deep, Cog is form fitted to be very user friendly. It's animated face moves and watches and interacts with the user.
For his part, AI founding father Marvin Minsky has scoffed at Cog saying that though Cog may seem sentient, it isn't really sentient (whatever that means). Breazeal's riposte that we can't know the answers to such questions about anything I think is quite on point.
Other research discussed involves problem solving robots and though they may have conquered a harder robot engineering problem, their result somehow doesn't seem as exciting as that of Breazeal's.
True to any book discussing human machines, this one of course involves input from Ray Kurzweil. And that's fine and good.
But as with the extending life span discussion, Kurzweil is another great example of a guy with things to say that deserve their own book. And since Kurzweil has written two of them, readers with an interest in these issues would probably be well advised to read either or both of them.
For his part, Kurzweil seems to believe that machines will achieve human like (and better) intelligence by brute force. Noting that processing power has been doubling on the order of once every two years or so, Kurzweil predicts that computers will be smarter than a human by 2020 and smarter than all humans by 2050.
Under Aubrey de Grey, Kurzweil believes his immortality won't come from telomere research and its like but rather his litteral fusion with an intelligent machine.
PROTECTING MOTHER EARTH
Along with the previous section this is one of the two biggest sections in Stevenson's book.
In it, he discusses the threat of global warming and also the threat of diminishing Earth resources.
Though he half heartedly acknowledges the wealth of scientific information that says "yes, we DO have a global warming problem" Stevenson is perhaps at his most optimist in this book by suggesting that our man made global warming problem does have man made solutions.
Most interesting of these is a process he discusses whereby excess CO2 can actually be sucked back out of the air. Though this research is in its tenative stages and could really use additional funding, this was the first time I actually felt the best about solving our global warming problem.
In terms of marshaling Earth resources, he discussed the creation of bacteria which could excrete their own gasoline and harvesting solar power...both of which are not even past their tentative stages.
WHAT IT ALL MEANS
For Stevenson, optimist that he is, all this amounts to a world like the one we have right now, but better where we live longer and are nicer to our planet.
In that sense his concluding chapters are little like a Hallmark card and a little like a long prayer.
So viewed they're fine, except when the cold reality of just emergent these researches all are.
In other words, the future may be great but it would also seem it's a long way off too.
