Soonish: Ten Emergent Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Penguin Press
Nonfiction, Humorous Nonfiction/Science
Themes: Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Space Stories
****+
Description
Since the earliest days of civilization (and likely earlier than that), people have speculated what the future would bring, what marvels and dangers awaited just beyond tomorrow: would we be zipping around a utopia in flying cars, or toiling in Martian mines under the whips of robotic overlords? Most predictions have turned out to be dead wrong (for better or worse), and yet time and again our world has been transformed, and will continue to be transformed, by new ideas and discoveries. The authors examine ten bleeding-edge fields, some of which are already making waves and others which may be destined for the dust-heap of predictions with those flying cars.
Review
Zach Weinersmith is the creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, one of my personal favorite online comics (if one that
admittedly is aimed at a higher academic and intellectual level than my paltry high school diploma qualifies me to appreciate), which frequently tackles
the occasional absurdities and potential pitfalls of scientific breakthroughs. This book explores several real-world technologies that may not be quite
ready for proverbial prime time, but which have the potential to remake society... sometimes in ways we may not like (or simply not be ready to handle,
though that could be said of most any seismic technological shift.) The Weinersmiths spell out what the technology is, where it currently stands, what it
could do for us (or to us), and the problems holding it back at the moment, from practical and economic issues to ethical concerns. From the problems with
offworld expansion to the possibilities of neurological upgrades, from custom-grown organs to augmented reality, they present a fascinating array of
technologies in an intelligent, accessible, and often humorous fashion. A closing chapter sums up some technologies that didn't make the final cut, while
an extensive list of acknowledgements and citations point the way to further reading on every subject covered. The potential futures that could be opened
by any of these technologies becoming mainstream are dazzling, dizzying, and occasionally disturbing, yet the idea that few might ever come to pass in my
lifetime - especially with a seemingly-increasing societal momentum away from science as a goal or even a concept - is also vaguely depressing. It's a very
enjoyable book even for undereducated readers like myself who are curious about such things.
As a minor nitpick, though, the ebook has a few formatting issues with text occasionally running over illustrations (not the first title I've read on
Overdrive to have this problem, unfortunately.) This is not new technology; is it that hard to get them to display properly?