The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future

by Damien Broderick (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.36

  What will life be like in the middle of the next century? How long will our children live? How dependent will we be on computers? How intelligent will our machines be? The rate of progress in many fields of research is accelerating fast - we are experiencing an exponential increase in our knowledge. For instance, within one generation computers have gone from filling whole rooms to being tiny laptops, while their computing power is doubling about every 18 months. The human genome is being unravelled, and today we are looking forward to some diseases being cured by gene surgery by the next decade. Whilst the future may be unpredictable, it is known that an explosion in human knowledge and abilities is expected to engulf us by about the middle of the next century. This text explains what research is going on in many fields and what life might be like in 50 years.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.36

  The rate at which technology is changing our world--not just on a global level like space travel and instant worldwide communications but on the level of what we choose to wear, where we live, and what we eat--is staggeringly fast and getting faster all the time. The rate of change has become so fast that a concept that started off sounding like science fiction has become a widely expected outcome in the near future - a singularity referred to as The Spike.

  At that point of singularity, the cumulative changes on all fronts will affect the existence of humanity as a species and cause a leap of evolution into a new state of being.

  On the other side of that divide, intelligence will be freed from the constraints of the flesh; machines will achieve a level of intelligence in excess of our own and boundless in its ultimate potential; engineering will take place at the level of molecular reconstruction, which will allow everything from food to building materials to be assembled as needed from microscopic components rather than grown or manufactured; we'll all become effectively immortal by either digitizing and uploading our minds into organic machines or by transforming our bodies into illness-free, undecaying exemplars of permanent health and vitality.

  The results of all these changes will be unimaginable social dislocation, a complete restructuring of human society and a great leap forward into a dazzlingly transcendent future that even SF writers have been too timid to imagine.