From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Fri May 01 1998 - 06:34:24 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 10:40 PM 4/30/98 -0500, Thom mentioned:
> >Viroid Life
> and
> >Last Flesh
>
> While I haven't seen either of those, I have just started to read/review
> the UK edition (Oxford UP) of VISIONS: HOW SCIENCE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE
> 21ST CENTURY, by the superstring theorist and science populariser Dr Michio
> Kaku. I haven't read enough to get a proper sense of it, but it's a tad
> cataloguish for my tastes, a bit plodding and list-ridden. But that might
> make it easy for journos to grab sound-bites from. His basic schema
> projects a consensus view (drawn, he repeatedly tells us proudly, from
> interviews with 150 `leading scientists', including more than few
> Nobelists) of life in the next 5 or 10 years, by 2020, and after 2050. He
> expected conscious AI only after the middle of the century, and is rather
> dismissive of Drexlerian nanotech. But he does keep emphasising
> exponential change in a properly Spikish manner.
>
> Anyone else reading Kaku?
I've read him, and after the recent Cassini protests, I am rather disgusted
with him. He is no scientist, but a grandstanding politically correct
scientific faddist. I am not surprised that he cannot forsee AI sooner, nor
accept the potential for nanontech. It fits with his anti-nuke, anti-cassini
views, which are rather narrow and self serving.
>
Mike Lorrey
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