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The Coming Convergence: Surprising Ways Diverse Technologies Interact to Shape Our World and Change the Future

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Stanley Schmidt is our advance scout, journeying ahead to the glorious, complex future that awaits us all, and he reports back in this fabulous book, chock-full of the same kind of lucid and insightful commentary that has made his ANALOG editorials must-reading for three decades now. Schmidt gives us the same kind of clear-headed thinking and cleanly written prose that we associated with Asimov and Sagan.

Dr. Schmidt has produced a thoughtful essay every month in his editorials for Analog. While this book is not a collection of those, it has the same sober, yet open intellectual inquisitiveness of those writings. And it has a single theme, which has not received enough attention, in my opinion. There was a time when men of science were also men of art, writing, and politics - people like Ben Franklin or Leonardo or Newton. Then the sciences became hyper-specialized, and that is the state of affairs today. However, technology is a different matter, and we see that what drives our world-wide societies, to a great degree, is the intended or unintended convergence of various technologies. Humanity reaches its highs and lows when different ideas are merged in ways not originally intended. Examples are landing men on the Moon, or crashing planes into buildings. This is our future, folks. We can learn how to progress wisely, or...

Written for the lay reader, one needs no background in science at all to understand every word of this book. It includes chapters that survey some cutting-edge technologies, indicating both how these resulted from diverse predecessors, and how they may yet evolve. Things like MRI, CT scans, and such are explained in simple terms. The latter part begins to wrestle with a strategy for managing these changes. The stakes could not be higher.

If one is interested in knowing where biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence combined together may lead us, if one is thrilled by the future prospect of a superhumanity with undescribable abilities and powers, then this book is highly recommended.

THE COMING CONVERGENCE: THE SURPRISING WAYS DIVERSE TECHNOLOGIES INTERACT TO SHAPE OUR WORLD AND CHANGE THE FUTURE comes from a physicist and writer who shows how past convergences between technologies have changed the world - and how new currents in biotechnology and information technology hold the same promise for the future. From the potentials for reduced pollution and longer lives to the issues of too much power in too few hands, THE COMING CONVERGENCE charts dangerous - and hopeful - future paths of development.