Reviews: The Undercover Economist, An Army of Davids, The Singularity is Near
Now don’t be sad / cause two out of three aint bad
Meat Loaf, Two out of three ain’t bad
From outta the library to this blog:
Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist should be required reading for humans. I would have majored in econ if I read this 10 years ago.
In contrast, An Army of Davids: How markets and technology empower ordinary people to beat big media, big government and other Goliaths bored me. It seemed like the book was a punched-up series of blog posts. While the overall message of “the internet will break down barriers” is a sound one, I still want my books to contain arguments backed up with research. Facts should have footnotes.
One of the books that Davids leaned heavily on is Ray Kurzwel’s The Singularity is Near, a fantastical look at the acceleration of technology and how it is quickly advancing/outpacing/replacing biology. Kurzweil’s premise is that humans don’t understand the accelerating, exponential changes that were born out of computer technology.
Some of the fun he dreams of? Machines with the power of the human brain will be available in the 2020s for the cost of a computer today.
From there, ideas come at a blistering pace as readers are introduced to “reversible computing” that could make a rock smarter than all humanity. And that’s just on page 134 of 487 densely-packed pages.
Ultimately, Kurzweil thinks we’re headed towards 2001: A Space Odyssey land here — namely that we’ll become machines, and then we’ll figure out how to bring information to matter, stretching into everything in our universe.
And who wouldn’t want to believe some of what he thinks will happen shortly? Come on — for the right price, we could live forever. And that’s my only complaint about the whole book. It’s too neat for this messy thing known as civilization.
I somehow doubt that I’ll be able to squirrel away enough money to be able to afford the nanobots necessary to fix the inevitable decay of my body. And I doubt my health insurance would cover that. But, Kurzweil says that upgrading my body will be something like purchasing mobile phone service: It will take awhile for the technology to mature, then it will be everywhere, just as mobile phone service took baby steps in the 80s and 90s and then exploded today so that now it’s assumed that you have a cell phone. I’ll take the T-Mobile life extension, thank you. Not-the-best-coverage, but I like the price.
More at kurzweilai.net
Categorized as books, reviews
3 Comments
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Dan has really pretty eyes. Oops, responding to the wrong post.
Well, it’s true. Yes, the eye thing, but also about the exponential growth of computational ability on silicon and other matter. However, the stumbling block is how the brain is wired to learn from experience, rather than just from data collection. The whole “learning from mistakes” and the need or use for redundancy in the grey matter. The overall ‘look and feel’ of a computer with the brain’s computational power vs. a computer might, let’s say, allow Big Blue to defeat some Russian in chess, but some of the oddities - like the inability to access a ‘data point’ (let’s say the name of a song) when ‘it’s on the tip of your tongue’ is something that is odd about the human brain.
There was a book called “The Physics of Immortality” that took this step of hardware sapiens as a foregone conclusion, then talked about how that computational power could create a virtual universe within the collapsing true universe and basically keep the ‘light sapiens’ immortal, or ‘virtually resurrect’ all past humans, and or POSSIBLE past humans, given that the possibilites are NOT infinite, but finite, just hella huge.
Like Dan’s prescription.