OKAY, I LIKE THE CARTOON THAT ACCOMPANIES IT, but Reihan Salam’s piece in Slate on An Army of Davids is a bit puzzling. At least, Salam doesn’t seem to have actually read the book, only Christine Rosen’s rather uninformative treatment, which he cites and praises. How else to explain statements like this one:
But Reynolds’ weakness isn’t that he’s a “techno-triumphalist” who sees robotic solutions everywhere. It’s that he sees only the robots’ upside.
Well, no. Actually, I devote a fair amount of space to the dangers posed by new technologies — from “horizontal knowledge” like cellphones inspiring riots like those in Nigeria over the Miss World pageant, to genetically engineered bioweapons and lethal nanodevices. And I pointed out that terrorism is an early, not-so-positive example of technology empowering the little guy (there’s a whole chapter on terrorism, in fact, so I can hardly be accused of neglecting the subject. Someone else at Slate found the book “frightening.”) As I wrote in the conclusion — in the hope, apparently vain, that even lazy reviewers would read that much:
While a world of hugely and vastly empowered souls may lurk in the future, we’re already living in a world in which individuals have far more power than they used to in all sorts of fields. Yesterday’s science fiction is todays’ reality in many ways that we don’t even notice.
That’s not always good. With technology bestowing powers on individuals that were once reserved to nation-states, the already-shrinking planet starts to look very small indeed. That’s one argument for settling outer space, of course, and many will also see it as an argument for reducing the freedom of individuals on Earth. If those latter arguments carry the day, it could lead to global repression. In its most benign form, we might see something like the A.R.M. of Larry Niven’s science fiction future history, a global semisecret police force run by the United Nations that quitely suppresses dangerous scientific knowledge. In less benign forms, we might see harsh global tyranny, justified by the danger of man-made viruses and similar threats. (As I write this, scientists in a lab in Atlanta have resurrected the long-dead 1918 Spanish Flu and published its genome, meaning that people with resources far below those of nation-states will now be able to recreate one of the deadliest disease agents in history.)
Still, I’m apparently a Pollyannaish techno-utopian because I hold a Faulknerian belief that mankind will not only survive, but prevail. Whatever. In truth, actual Pollyannaish techno-utopians are pretty hard to find — Ray Kurzweil is often charged with Pollyannaism, but his book The Singularity is Near is devoted as much to grim warnings as to rosy scenarios — but the luddite crowd seems to want them so much that where they do not exist, they are invented. Of course, the pop culture is sufficiently loaded in favor of techno-doom, from Paul Ehrlich to Jeremy Rifkin to Al Gore, that anyone who doesn’t run in circles screaming that we’re all going to die looks Pollyannaish by comparison.
As for “cybernetic arms,” well, here’s a start. And here’s much more. Oh, and here.