You heard it here first ...

[Dave Monroe]

Picked up today ...

Baldi, Pierre.  The Shattered Self: The End of Natural
   Evolution.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

"Through evolution our brains have been wired to
provide us with an inner sense of self, a feeling that
each of us is a unique individual delimited by precise
boundaries. We have also been wired to reproduce
ourselves in a certain way. Baldi argues that this
self-centered view of the world is scientifically
wrong. Its past success lies in its being an adequate
model during our evolutionary bootstrapping: a world
without molecular biotechnology, human cloning, and
the Internet. Eventually we must come to terms with
the fact that genomes, computations, and mind are
fluid, continuous entities, in both space and time.
The boundary between the self and the world has begun
to blur and ultimately may evaporate entirely. Baldi
offers not predictions but an open-eyed exploration of
our current state of knowledge and the possibilities
that lie ahead."

http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262025027

Cf. ...

"If our world survives, the next great challenge to
watch out for will come--you heard it here first--when
the curves of research and development in artificial
intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all
converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable,
and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope,
are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly
something for all good Luddites to look forward to if,
God willing, we should live so long."

Thomas Pynchon, "Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?," New
York Times, October 28th, 1984 ...

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

It pays to browse (even if it's me who's eventually
doing the paying) ...

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