Customer Reviews

The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Damien's Spike is at very least an entertaining read -- somewhat like an amusement park thrill ride "we're going to be scanned into computers and live on as ever expanding immortal intelligences and/or exceeded by wild run away artificial intelligences if we don't get turned into nano gray-goo before then, Weeeeeooo..." and around and around the ride goes.

Thus, it's easy not to take the subject matter very seriously...if I didn't see whispers of the spike in my work and field. The basic premise of the book, and other's like it such as "Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil, is that technology doesn't just advance linearly, it feeds back upon itself. For example: faster computers let people simulate and explore new computer architectures and new materials which in turn help overcome bottleneck's to developing ever faster computers. Like interest payments on your money, technology lends itself to compound, not just linear growth. We'll, that's spike enough, but the further argument is that the day will come when a computer program will be able to figure out how to make itself function better/smarter and what new hardware changes it needs to run faster. Or once robots can design and build better robots, the compounding will itself compound and the rate of change goes hyper-exponential.
I see this in my own work -- teraflop (T trillion floating point operations per second) machines will be on your lap before the decade is out. These will double for several cycles even if semiconductor technology hits a heat or quantum wall. But cheap 1, 2, 4 teraflop machines on every researcher's desk will cause material breakthroughs or trigger post-silicon computing and then 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 teraflop (T) machines are next...I put the date of 128 teraflops as 2022. Could go faster due to above advancement cycle, could slip 10 years if post-silicon is needed and harder than expected. 128 T is my (not Damien's) magic number because some claim ... that the human brain averages ~4 T, but since we don't understand the nuances of intelligence, I figure we can brute force by approximating at something like the rule of thumb where you can start relying on the law of large numbers in statistical sampling, or a factor of ~30. 4*30 T = 120 T.
If robotic advances keep coming, especially the advent of strong, fast artificial muscle fiber ... we're looking at a very strange world in the 2020's. Take one example: When will the "war on terrorism" end? How about 2025 when we can mass produce robot spies and soldiers in weeks for a ~$2000 a pop while fanatics still take 12-25 years and a minimum of $25K even at 3rd world rates? Yes, they might be able to steal a few, just like they can steal a few airplanes, but techno societies will be able to produce millions.
Downsides of the book:
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Spends time showing past attempts at extrapolating curves that failed (speed of transport should essentially be infinite by now, power per person should be 1 sun apiece), but then dismisses the possibility of misreading the curves here. "This time for sure".

Dwells on "minting" where especially nano-robots can make themselves and then turn around and make you anything you want. Everything will be free. Then mentions that things like brewing bear that is already essentially nano (yeast)-engineering of just this sort and last I checked, beer is not free. But...this time it's different.

Little critique of scanning and uploading the brain other than having some moral/emotional qualms if the upload is destructive of the original body. Well, I've got some basic critiques.
(1) You're brain isn't going to be very happy, or at least effective if you are simulated in a computer and not running a robot body well matched to our limitations: 2 legs, 2 arms, basic degrees of freedom in motion, because so much of our brain is built premised on the nature of our body, eyes, senses.
(2) The ability to download other's knowledge is also fundamentally limited. You can train of a pattern recognition machines, but the structure tends to get fixed at which time it can't just incorporate scads of new knowledge without flushing the old. This is a fundamental limitation, not fast hardware. The "you" that is "you" will get washed out in the great accelerated interchange of knowledge and so where's the immortality other than in the general sense that we already have: "not us as individuals, but all of life". Your choice is to stay much unchanged and heavily bored by the eons or to loose/replace the you that is you.

Ah well. End of review:

In actuality, this book better serves as a sort of entertaining reference to the scientists and philosophers working in the field. So I recommend it -- 4 stars, good airplane read, good to have sitting nearby to remember who you want to look up on Google.

The 'Spike', also known as the 'Singularity', is simply science and technological advances happening so rapidly that they appear as an almost vertical line when charted against the passage of time. Advances in disparate fields tend to feed on each other in a synergistic manner, making the graph of the Spike even steeper. We seem to be on the threshold of possibilities that will transform human life on the planet and beyond past most peoples' wildest imaginations. Damien Broderick presents a very balanced view, giving both the optimists and pesimists their viewpoints.

According to Broderick, advanced artificial intelligences and nanotechnology may be two of the technologies that will predominate when the Spike arrives, but he says there probably will also be much we can't even conceive of now. Broderick writes that the Spike is not inevitable, as a disaster of one kind or another may overtake us, but most likely we will see one. If a Spike does take place it could transform everything about us, it would make for very interesting times indeed. Post Spike possibilities include immortal life for us, and a posthuman life throughout the cosmos, nano-manufacture of almost anything we want for free or nearly free, to the gray goo scenario in which nanobots are set free on the planet to reduce everything, including us, back to their component atoms. But the Luddites are wrong, we cannot stop or turn back, the promises of these technologies are just too great, and Broderick discusses this area superbly.

Damien Broderick quotes several prominent researchers in various relevant fields of science and technology, their views make excellent reading, and several of them give guesses as to when a Spike may occur, but in the end we can only surmise the barest outline a Spike may take. As Broderick states in the book, "we can't yet imagine the shape of things to come". This is a book well worth reading, with extensive notes and suggested further reading at the back of the volume.

In "The Spike," Damien Broderick has written an interesting, thought provoking, if sometimes frustrating book. The title of the book refers to what occurs on the right hand edge of any graph showing exponential growth. His thesis is that within the next 50 years, one or more technologies (nanotech, artificial intelligence, etc) will hit the spike and the world, and humanity itself, will be transformed beyond recognition.

Because the book covers possible scenarios ranging from the probable to the almost absurd, it will be easy for many to dismiss the entire thing as a lot of nonsense. But I think that would be a mistake. There is much in this book that should be thought provoking, even if you reject some of the wilder ideas. It is easy to forget sometimes that the pace of change is speeding up dramatically. As recently as 10 years ago, the worldwide web (at least as we all know it today) did not exist - now try and imagine your life without it!

I do regret that Mr. Broderick seems to have largely bought into the typical left-wing rubbish about how much worse off the poor (or maybe all of us) are today than they were in the past. Would that be the past of pre-civil rights sharecroppers in the South? Or maybe the past of the wave of immigrants of the late 19th/early 20th century described by Upton Sinclair and his contemporaries? And I have to confess that I am still struggling with the math that says a guaranteed stipend from the government of $25,000 for a family of four would "cost as much a small war." Last time I checked, 2.5 trillion dollars was a lot! Thankfully in other places in the book, Mr. Broderick seems to understand these complaints - for example when he asks the reader to imagine being in medieval Paris or Pharonic Egypt (as a member of the working classes).

I also wish Mr. Broderick had devoted more pages to the possible backlash against technology we have witnessed in the past few years (e.g., the fight over genetically modified food). But overall those are fairly modest quibbles to what is otherwise a truly thought-provoking book. The human mind has trouble grappling with truly large numbers - be it the size of the universe or the exponential growth of computer processing capability. This book will get you thinking about the possibilities and consequences of those numbers.

I picked this book up because I'm an futurist info-junkie. My expectations were modest, the reviews for this were good, but not stellar. However, after just a handful of pages I was completely hooked (I read this book in a night, a very long, very late night).

Damien Brodericks' book "The Spike" screams for our immediate attention to an impending convergence of a handful of rapidly developing technologies (principally nanotechnology, biotechnology, networking, and Artificial Intelligence), each revolutionary on their own, but combined, transcendental; Broderick calls that convergence "the spike".

The concept alone is worth the read. Seldom do most people consider just where humanity now stands in relation to technology and its utility. Where, for example, transportation technology for all but a few thousand years of almost 3 million was our feet and crude "shoes" that permitted 3 mile per hour travel, then animals, chariots, etc. up until about two hundred years ago where a train could propel people at 20 miles per hour, then, "within living memory of the elderly", cars enabled ever faster travel, then planes, jets, rockets, now technologies allow for video conferencing at light speed. Broderick points out that if you put that progress on a chart, and drew out just the last 300,000 years of mankinds progress in transport speed increases, you'd see a flat line until you get to the furthest edge of the graph, then a near vertical spike.

Cool stuff.

And much cooler when you consider that (in his well reasoned belief) if you were to draw out a graph starting 100 years ago, and ending one hundred years from now, we'd find ourselves right at the very beginnings of an incline into a technological spike that will (barring some catostrophic event) fundamentally re-landscape humans (and what it means to be human) in such a material way, you could argue that we wouldn't really remain human at all...

This is very approachable science, Broderick, unlike many other writers attempting to translate the almost imponderable and ever increasing torrent of science from the frontier, does allot of digesting for us in this book. So, while a Matt Ridley (author of "Genome" and "Nature Via Nurture" among others) might be more inclined to try and fill in more factual basis to cement understanding of a particular science, Broderick casts a justifiably wide net over a whole constellation of different scientific disciplines; and, as a consequence, doesn't go into great detail in giving a full "3D" view of each very interesting technology. This will no-doubt leave some more scientific-minded readers wanting for more in the "basis department". For that class, I'd suggest Ridley, but also writers like Hans Moravec (writer of "Robot"), or Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Age of Spiritual Machines".

"The Spike" offers optimistic and intensly interesting scenarios for the prospect of a better life in the future as well as realistic concerns that we should start to seriously think about. At a time where it seems we are constantly bombarded by nay-saying "gloom and doom" forecasts for the future, this book is a refreshing (but not overly optimistic) glimpse into a future so potentially wild, so potentially different, it seems more like Science Fiction.

Hope this was helpful.

We are already in the early stages of a transition that will radically alter civilization and even the human species itself. The Spike, by cultural theorist and science writer Damien Broderick, offers a fast-paced survey of cutting-edge science today and in the not-so-distant future.

Advances in several fields of applied science are following a course whose graphs have remained relatively flat throughout human history but are suddenly becoming steeper. If current trends continue, the graphs will become almost vertical within the next thirty to fifty years. Dr. Broderick refers to this interval of rapid change as The Spike, because that's what the graphs resemble.

Probably the most commonly known of these trends Is Moore's Law, which holds that computing power (expressed as the number of components on an integrated circuit) per dollar will double every eighteen months to two years. The arithmetic is easy to do. Start with 2 x 1 = 2; 2 x 2 = 4; 2 x 4 = 8; by the time you've repeated the multiplication process twenty times you've increased computing power by a factor of a million, and the twenty-first multiplication increases it by a million more. Although trends do not always continue to the runaway Spike stage, there are no obvious reasons to anticipate that current growth will slow significantly within the next thirty years.

Because The Spike represents such a dramatic shift in the rate of technological advance, it is impossible to accurately predict what the post-Spike world will be like, but by projecting existing trends into the future experts can make educated guesses. The three fields which are likely to have the greatest impact on the future are molecular genetics, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Dr. Broderick provides an intriguing tour of some of the technological wonders that may be part of our reality later this century.

Genetic engineering, more fully covered in Broderick's book The Last Mortal Generation, could abolish disease, aging, and even death.

Molecular Nanotechnology, or minting (from the initials MNT), may allow the assembly of goods at the molecular level. Using minting, you could produce "whatever you want to build, if you have the plan and the laws of physics don't forbid it." With self-replicating assemblers, finished products could be had for little more than the cost of the raw materials. Take diamonds. They're made of carbon, and carbon is cheap. The minting process could use diamond, with a strength-to-weight ratio fifty times greater than steel, to fashion the frames of high-rise buildings or space stations. A serving of perfectly aged and roasted prime rib could be constructed atom by atom. Walkways could be paved with photovoltaic cells.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, might take the form of a PC with the reasoning power of the human mind; or a self-aware Internet; or a Super Intelligent machine beside which a human would seem incredibly slow and stupid. Humans could enhance their brains by linking them to other brains or to machines. Or human personalities could be uploaded to machines. The last two possibilities add new dimensions to the question of self-identity.

Such things as diamond sky scrapers and linked human brains may seem more like fantasy than science, but they are based on foreseeable development of existing technology. And shockingly, such advanced development could take place within the next fifty years. Mathematician Verner Vinge predicts a spike some time between 2030 and 2100 for AI, and graphs of trends in several other fields of applied science converge around the year 2050.

While Dr. Broderick's survey of the current and possible future states of technology are fascinating reading, the most important parts of the book may be those dealing with the questions of technology's impact on human society. Even wonderful things such as free food and shelter would call for an incredible amount of social adjustment. What happens, Dr. Broderick asks, when there are no longer jobs? What would a society of immortal people be like? Should intelligent machines enjoy human rights?

Even if the Spike occurs later than predicted, or not at all, technology will continue a rapid acceleration that will have an effect on every aspect of human life. It's happening now and has been in the First World since the 1970's. Many of our social institutions are already obsolete, and the situation will only grow worse as time goes by unless we make a greater effort to keep up with our technology.

In The Spike Dr. Broderick has given us the beginning of a discussion that I hope will be picked up and continued by the brightest among our social scientists, lawmakers, educators, and anyone else who wishes to influence the future rather than to be a passive victim of precipitous change

For anyone interested in where technology is helping to drive the human species and society, The Spike by Damien Broderick is one of the best books to come along so far. Undoubtedly written by someone who readily embraces the positive possibilities for the future of humanity, it nonetheless outlines many of the potential dangers and problems confronting us as exponential change impacts our world over the next few decades. He covers today's major technologies and technological trends in a highly readable and entertaining manner and presents perspectives on our near-future that are reasonable, well documented, and thought provoking. Not science fiction, this book is a valuable and practical contribution to the continuing and creative and very important dialog on where our world is ultimately headed. Highly recommended.

This book could be considered an update of Arthur C. Clarke's (yes THE Arthur C. Clarke) landmark 1962 study entitled Profiles of the Future. Dr. Broderick looks at the progress made in the nearly four decades since Profiles, and presents the view from the early 21st century. The two books deal with similar subject matter, but to contrast the works, Clarke's stunning work is entirely focussed on the science and technological advances facing humanity, whereas Broderick takes a rather more broad view, considering some of the consequences of progress, as well as making some fearless specific predictions, such as the ones found on page 87. This book will be one you may take down from your shelf occasionally for the next 40 years, looking up some specific thing you know you read there, then getting sidetracked, like you always did as a child when looking up something in the encyclopedia. (Remember those? We used them before the Web.)

Whereas Clarke is from a space science and engineering background Damien Broderick's art springs from a literary and scientific palatte of colors. The Spike is a book that gains momentum as it goes along, so that it actually seems to have a shape to it, like an upwardly reaching... spike. Buy it, read it, find out where the dedicated futurists think we are heading and what happens when we get there.

The ideas explored are fascinating, but the prose used to do the exploring is wildly uneven. While there are chunks here and there that approach coherence, to a large extent the writing consists of a sort of manic hyper-caffeinated chattiness that at times verges on hysteria. Liberally peppered with irrelevant asides that careen from topic to topic without differentiating fact from wild speculation, the book is also repetitive and poorly edited. There's also an annoying habit of taking commonly used terms and arbitrarily coining new names for them ("minting" for nanotech assembly, the titular "spike" for Vinge's singularity). The jacket blurb casts this as accessible pop science writing in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke's "Profiles of the Future." While somewhere under all that verbiage Broderick seems to have a basic command of the subject, trust me -- Clarke he ain't.

I read the other informative reviews, and as I would find it difficult to add anything more of substance that the handful of reviewers have not already said, I will simply add that this book, The Spike, was quite simply an enjoyable and fascinating read.
It was straightforward and 'technology-friendly' enough that the 99% of us whose primary literary pursuits does NOT include sci-fi, would still be able to enjoy the book without worrying that it was 'over our head'. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in what the future has to offer. The author obviously spent time researching what he said, and brought his own creativity and intuitiveness to create a splendid treatise on whats in store for most of us in the not so distant future.
Dr. Edward Reifman

I got this book on impulse. A quick read of the description and thought...why not. So now that it is well worn and the pages are covered with highlighter marks and red ink notes I guess I must say this is a great book. If you like science fiction and you are a technogeek...technology in general...all flavors..then this book will bring to you insight of what is more real than Joe Schmuck walking down the street might think. Well written. Fun. Plenty of - oh listen to this - as you read aloud a passage to someone because you found something really cool.
Just do it.