30 September 2010
The Chaos Scenario - Bob Garfield; The Age of Spiritual Machines - Ray Kurzweil
Read these to take a break in between the first and the second Stieg Larsson books. With The Chaos Scenario, one of your two two favorite hosts of On The Media riffs on the various disruptive aspects the internet will have on media, business, and, ultimately, society as a whole. There were many questions and few answers but rather cautionary tales. If you like his discursive style on OTM, you'll enjoy his very conversational writing style.
Kurzweil's book presents a conundrum: how to objectively approach a 10-year-old book that attempts to predict the world 10 years into the future (and much further)? Additional: how to give fair judgment when the author emphasizes their credentials yet over-estimates potential accomplishments within those credentialed areas? This was an impulse purchase after reading it referenced with praise in several discussion threads. Although many ideas were interesting, I came away disliking his inelegant, artless writing style and generally dry structure. In contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed the predictions and explications of bioengineering in Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future, even though I disagreed with his conclusions.
[ update 30 Nov 2010 ]
Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism from IEEE Spectrum [ via Slashdot ] gives a drubbing to predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines, examining both the difficulties in separating what had been common knowledge 10 years ago from what seems prescient now, and the difficulties in getting Kurzweil to admit when he was, obviously, wrong. The inexplicable crowing that Kurzweil does in the book regarding his past business successes seems more explicable now.
The Chaos Scenario; Bob Garfield
The Age of Spiritual Machines; Ray Kurzweil
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