Customer Reviews

Beyond Humanity

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3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
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I recommend it as a book that stitches together many various theories into a coherent and entertaining future. Two major faults though stood out while I was reading it.

1. Many of the arguments presented to support hypothetical future scenarios are sloppy. Obvious difficulties are skipped over without mention, many assumptions are made without acknowledgement, and sometimes I wonder about the supporting facts presented. Good techniques for preaching to the converted but will give a meticulous critic a field day.

2. It annoyed me to no end that so many ideas presented in the book are without references. I have read just about every idea presented in this book before but it is rare that the authors credit the appropriate sources. I am not sure if they are lazy in their hard research or if they want to take credit themselves -- either way I am worried.

Foretelling the future, once the realm of mystics and entrail pullers, is now a subject of serious scientific study. Paul and Cox offer us a rational and plausible scenario of what the future holds for humanity. With backgrounds in biology and computer engineering, they've combined to bring competence to an enduring question: Where are we going? You may not like their view of the road ahead, but it's impossible to ignore their forecast.

Their arguments focus on developments in neurosciences and computing power. They foresee a merger of these two disciplines resulting in the creation of a new humanity capable of engineering new, immortal physical brain carriers - bodies. Bodies themselves, as any gene can verify, are of minor importance. They are in essential agreement with Richard Dawkins that the selfish gene, in replicating itself, casts off the brain/mind of its host and losing whatever that mind has accumulated during its life. Their forecast is that the brain, using cybernetic technologies, will be able to avoid that waste by taking control of what DNA does during its thoughtless replication activity.

This is a momentous proposal, worthy of serious consideration. The so- called 'moral' issues of whether humanity should engage in such activity, aren't shrugged off. Paul and Cox contend that there will be Rejectionists who will refused the option of cyberevolution and remain mortal. They suggest the Rejectionists will remain the chief source of art, music and other more diverse roles in life. We are left unclear as to how diverse the cyberhumans will become. The authors argue that the cyberhumans will be the ones to populate other planets, finding their diversity in response to new environments.

The only real flaw in this book is ignoring the power of DNA in driving our lives and society. Whether we will ever understand the workings of DNA sufficiently to actually create a wide range of individuals remains problematic. The individual who first successfully transforms into a cyberhuman will set a pattern more likely to be repeated than modified. To create discrete cyber-individuals will be tremendously resource extravagant. This is likely lead to a narrow range of available DNA to launch the cyberpopulation. As we have already experienced with the shrinking gene pool of crop seeds, such a reduced variety is highly vulnerable to virus assault. An organism that succeeds in infecting such a limited diversity can quickly wipe out the whole cyberhuman population. Modifying the gene pool to resist such an infestation will take more resources and the Rejectionists will again be successful survivors through their genetic diversity.

This flaw, however powerful, doesn't detract from the significant questions raised and developed in this compelling book. If you wonder about the future, if you think computers are only for entertainment, if you think humans are the logical end of evolution, then buy and read this fascinating book.

Paul and Cox present intriguing ideas and insights covering broad territory ranging from cosmology to social commentaries on politics and religion of the late 20th century. The authors focus on what appears to be the likely path for human evolution in the next century. Although Paul and Cox indulge in some heavy-handed treatment of contemporary social and political issues, they snipe equally at all political parties and conventional belief systems without prejudice. They really drop a bomb on religion in general - seems they have some personal ax to grind here. The authors overestimate the intellectual maturity of our species on this issue ignoring the important stabilizing affect of religion in a society recently descended from the trees. Humanity is not ready to cast off the warm blanket of religion and face the cold nausea of a morally inert universe. Overall, an excellent and thought-provoking text that should stimulate a lot of dialog in the future.

This book is at the pop end of pop science. Its not tightly argued or particularly well written. I suspect it will also only alter the minds of people disposed to the sciTech outlook of the world rather than the faithful. Though the constant jibes at religous beleifs are amusing. clearly the authors are rightly somewhat embarassed by the religousity of their compatriots. However the book is a wonderfully audatious attempt to plot out the potential future of the universe. The questions are so big and important yet almost totally ignored that any book that has a stab at sketching a future is to be warmly congratulated. For me it has been clear for some time that humanity is very near the endgame - that the exponential increase in technology will lead to a break point pretty soon ie 50-100 years. I had been of the view that the instability of high tech ie the vastly increased capacity for individuals to introduce self replicating pathogens of some sort or another would very likely thrust us back into the pre human stages of life on Earth. Paul and Cox paint an in some ways more optimistic scenario in which our soon to be built robot Mind Children will take up the evolutionary batton and charge at lightening pace towards the colonisation and sentientisation of this and potentially other universes. Which of these two types of scenarios pans out is too my mind perhaps the most important question facing the universe. The Cox+Paul sketch skates over several crucial questions such as 1 Is consciousness just a fortunate and wonderful byproduct of a computational system of sufficient but not excessive complexity\speed. ie is our consciousness something of a Goldilocks phenomenon - in which case migration to a an advanced inorganic substrate may not seem such a compelling prospect. In any case the leap into a cyber being does look awfully like suicide for most people.I can imagine a cyberbeing finding Hans Morovec's mind worth retaining for a while, but really cannot imagine a sophisticated cyber being too interested in retaining much of the average Aunt Agatha or indeed of the rest of us.

2 More thought needs to be given to how the evolutionary process will drive things forward.

The book also raises but does not really deal with - no criticism of the authors as they cannot be experts in everything - questions as to how economics will work out in an era of nanotechnology and superabundance.

The book, like every other ontyhe subject is alos a little to US scentric. Having been travelling the 3rd world for some time now, it is clear that to most of hunaity, ideas which more or less make sense in PAlo Alto look completely crazy in a civilsation which has stagnated for thousands of years. Anyhow It's absolutely fascinating stuff and I only wish there were more books and people attempting to tackle these vital issues.

I bought this book based on the almost uniformly positive reviews here. I was disappointed. The thesis is mind-bending and interesting, but the arguments are sloppy, unreferenced, ignore major issues, and go into great detail about secondary ramifications. And in the even more speculative later chapters, the authors slip into ridiculing anyone who doesn't "get it."

I like to read books about what will happen in the future. However, a lot of these books never mention nanotechnology, which is the science of the atomic scale manipulation of matter. Nanotechnology is almost inevitable and promises to keep us young forever and improve our bodies with enhancements and produce products, including food, very cheaply, or even free! BEYOND HUMANITY delves into nanotechnology deeply, and the book portrays the future in a extremely positive light, and I agree. This may begin to happen in only about 50 years from now, according to the authors. If you only read one book this year, read this one, the vast majority of people have no idea what the future holds in store, this book is a great roadmap to it.

Read this book if you what to understand where our society is headed in the near future. Gregory S. Paul and Earl D. Cox have put together some extremely well thought out theories of where the computer revolution is taking us. They base these theories on a wealth of facts from the past and present.

The biggest revelation for me was realizing that the advancement in knowledge and computing power is a result of the driving force of information exchange. There are many underlying similarities to thermodynamics, and this book hints at this. Evolution, Thermodynamics, Biology, Material Science, and Information Technology are all discussed in the book. If this book is right, the next fifty years will be illuminating.

The idea that robots could supplant humanity has been around at least since the 1920's, when Karel Capek anglicized the Czech word "robota" and introduced it into the English language through his play "Rossum's Universal Robots." Lately the idea has taken on new life because of a possibly misplaced emphasis on Moore's Law and the growing power of computer networks. But a couple years ago I read where a real-world robotics engineer joked that if the robots are going to take over, they'd better act quickly because the batteries we give them only last for about a half-hour or so.

Nonetheless, this book covers ground that should be familiar to people who have already been exposed to similar scenarios popularized in books by Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Warwick, Damien Broderick and others. It's pretty much plain-vanilla Transhumanist wishful thinking, though livened up by a discussion of the faults of traditional religious belief systems.

My main problem with it is that Paul and Cox's scenario requires about as many critical assumptions as the Drake Equation to turn out just so. Social acceptance of new technologies isn't as straightforward as the authors assume. Why, for example, don't we have technologically doable videophones (a science-fictional cliché about life in the 21st Century), while we do have those obnoxious and unreliable cellphones everywhere these days? Apart from the technical considerations, the lack of demand for the former suggests that we probably don't value having to confront and interpret one another's body language as much as you would have predicted from the characterization of our species as social primates. For similar reasons, the authors' assumption that most people will readily upload into cyber-bodies can't be substantiated until something like that really becomes available. Although we should have learned by now that there are usually unintended consequences to what we do, I haven't seen evidence for emergent and unforeseen AI-like behavior coming from software written by humans for human purposes. There is nothing analogous to Moore's Law for the evolution of software. And even if there are powerful economic incentives to create software with such behavior, it doesn't necessarily have to happen on a short time scale if it turns out to be really hard.

Paul and Cox are more on target in their discussion of the perverse backwardness of traditional religious worldviews in response to current and foreseeable progress. Christians should realize that something is wrong with their story when virgins can now routinely give birth via modern reproductive medicine, and soon without even genetic contributions from men. When Rush Limbaugh went deaf, he didn't pray to some deity to restore his hearing -- he got a cochlear implant, which seems to be working well enough to save his radio career. Advocates of the creationist "Intelligent Design" theory have a problem they don't even realize yet: Humans are intelligently designing and producing things of ever greater complexity, especially computers, yet they are totally unlike things found in nature. No theist ever thought of attributing to his deity the ability to create a computer, which suggests that humans are able to do things that the postulated deity can't! (That's why bio-engineering is denounced as "playing god," while computer engineering isn't.) As the authors say on page 410, "As much as they may hate to admit it, the religious and the mystical know that science and technology do not just make promises that never quite seem to come to pass, or claim miracles that cannot be separated from illusion. They deliver the goods. They make pretend magic real." When "SciTech" gets to the point where it can reverse human aging and resuscitate "dead" people from cryonic suspension, the whole rationale for religion will be thrown into question. Paul and Cox are a little too hard on Buddhism, however, for Buddhists were way ahead of the curve when they developed the insight centuries ago, now substantiated by modern cognitive neuroscience, that the perception of selfhood is illusory. (However I find it ironic that certain Transhumanists want to deny selfhood to people while attributing it to "spiritual machines"!)

Paul and Cox finally go astray by putting too much of the burden of conquering aging and death on their predicted cyber "future minds." While they emphasize the importance of funding scientific education and research now, so that the breakthrough they are predicting will come sooner and save more human lives, they don't seem to realize that there are plenty of things we can be doing with current human intelligence to improve our survival chances. For one thing, there are some as yet unreported breakthroughs in the cryopreservation of the human brain that could enable people dying now a chance to be resuscitated by future medicine. For another, the genetic mechanisms of aging are quickly being discovered, allowing scientists to design drugs that could give us the anti-aging effects of calorie restriction without some of the drawbacks.

On the whole this book gives an overdetermined version of Transhumanist thinking. Better to read it in conjunction with several others, along with related Web texts, to get a better sense of what Transhumanism is all about.

It is one thing to contemplate the self destruction of the human species through its own folly. It is quite another, much more disturbing thing to realise that in an evolutionary wink, we are going to willingly replace ourselves with mind computers. The book "Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolution and Future Minds" makes a compelling if sometimes somewhat rambling case for the latter eventuality. It should be required reading for anyone who is not utterly convinced that he is completely open minded (no pun intended) and perhaps particularly for who is. Thank you, Messrs Paul and Cox.

This book will grab you from the first page and take you on a vision of the future where people will never die and where our descendents will be robots that will eventually populate the entire universe. The authors paint a very convincing story of a future which they think is inevitable.
"... these machines will see and feel, care and wonder, not just as well as we do, but far better than we can ever hope to. There will be a world of seemingly magical power in which the collective of super-minds will perform (or will conduct) super-science millions of times faster the we humans." (pg. 8)
"When the winds of change deposit us in the future of our dreams, you can be sure we won't be in Kansas anymore. Humanity, as we know it, will be facing a rapid extinction, not from natural causes...but from a situation of our own making. We will find our niche on Earth crowded out by a better and more competitive organism. Yet this is not the end of humanity, only its physical existence as a biological life form. Mankind will join our newly invented partners. We will download our minds into vessels created by our machine children and, with them, explore the universe." (pg.8)
It is the exponential growth of technology that will make this vision possible as the authors write, "the power of calculation has grown an astounding trillion times in less than 100 years! Over the last 50 years, computer speed has expanded some ten millionfold.." (pg. 201)
"There were few cars in 1920 and millions of them in 1930; there wer few home computers in 1975 and millions of them in 1995, and there will be millions of robots among us in a few decades." (pg. 241). (Robots) "will need humans less and less, and fewer and fewer folks will be able to find work. Imagine a world where humans are competing with hundreds of millions of mobile robots, most of them becoming smarter all the time." (pg. 251)
There is a section on the death of religion towards the end of the book which may disturb some people and probably would have been better off not included. There is also a general belief by the authors that we are probably the only intelligent life forms in the universe which they argue unconvincingly. But these two faults are minor in a book of this length.
Close to 500 pages in length I have read it cover to cover 4 times now and always find something new everytime. You do not have to be a scientific expert in this field to appreciate this masterpeice because the writing style reminds me of watching a good sci fi movie. The only difference is that this is NOT fiction!
If you have children or grandchildren you should definately read this book because it is very possible that they may never die!