From Publishers Weekly
When Mulhall sees the future, he pictures every home having a virtually cost-free desktop fabricator, not unlike an ink jet printer, that is able to create any three-dimensional object desired; he envisions being able to change the color of a car, or clothes, simply by speaking. Mulhall, who heads an environmental software consultancy, believes that nanotechnology, the ability to rearrange individual atoms, will lead to technological advances that will change every aspect of our world, including our own species. Mulhall' s exuberance, however, does not fully compensate for his repetitiveness and lack of specificity when he postulates that nanotechnology will lead to such leaps forward in computing power that we will soon create robots capable of independent thought, emotional response and reproduction. We will, he argues, soon be faced with a new species, Robo sapiens, and be forced to deal with the issue of "robot rights." Mulhall urges readers to foster this technology because he believes that it is the only way humans will be able to combat what he claims are the most pressing threats facing our species: massive earthquakes, immense tsunamis capable of inundating the entire east coast of North America and asteroid collisions of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs. In the end, Mulhall's musings seem more science fiction than science; they are entertaining, but not particularly thought provoking. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Consultant Mulhall takes readers on a speculative tour of how nanotechnology will impact our world over the next decades. Along with describing what MIT types are currently cooking up (electronic paper), Mulhall injects pertinent questions about his topics, for example, whether business is adroit enough to adapt to the new technology; how nanotechnology might improve the environment; and if robotic "transhumans" should have rights. Mulhall contends that humanity is on the cusp of an unpredictably disruptive and decentralizing revolution and spins decidedly weird and disconcerting scenarios of a future of self-replicating nanobots, robo-slaves, and robo-pets. He also speculates on how nanotechnology might defend the planet against disasters such as cataclysmic earthquakes, tsunamis, or asteroids. Mulhall's eclectic tract bursts with amazement at developments in the field, but its very variety and digressiveness make technosavvy enthusiasts its likely audience. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Book News, Inc.
Environmental and software consultant Mulhall speculates, in a somewhat scattershot manner, on the impact of certain advanced technologies on human society and its relationship with the natural world. A major theme running through the work is the dangers that natural disasters pose to humankind and the technological solutions that may mitigate those disasters.Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR


Quarterly Review of Biology, June 2004
"...the many and varied descriptions of emerging nanotechnology [are] fascinating..."


Nanotechnology Magazine April 15 2002
"compelling… authoritative… defines one of the great challenges of our time …an impressive walk through a lot of territory."


New Scientist, November 16, 2002
"You have to read th[is]. Catch up on this year's best books."


Fortean Times, December 2002
"An informed and provocative manifesto for a technological century."


SmallTimes, November/December 2002
"Mulhall elevates the book above futuristic wand waving...surprisingly up-to-date...a fresh perspective"


Choice, January 2003
"...a realistic glimpse into the potentials of various futures ... carefully separating science fact from science fiction..."


foresight: Journal of Future Studies, Strategic Thinking & Policy
"...a call to face the future and to act..."


Future Survey
"Broadly ambitious and imaginative...an excellent introduction..."


Nanotechnology Now
"I highly recommend it. Put this one at the top of your list!"


NanoTechnology Magazine
"A must-read for environmentalists...a great start for everyone who wants an overview of a science-enabled super-era."


Book Description
What do a drought in New York and an earthquake in Seattle have to do with a "nanotube" a few billionths of a meter long at the University of Tokyo? Our Molecular Future reveals a striking new possibility: We are on the verge of being able to protect ourselves from nature’s worst attacks. Tools such as carbon nanotubes may help us cope in ways that until now have been described as science fiction. If we succeed, we might solve a troubling question about scientific research: Why risk it? Why risk powerful new technologies that may destroy us? With compelling evidence, Douglas Mulhall shows that the answers to such questions may be found by focusing on what the environment does to us, rather than only what we do to the environment. His book shows where our technologies might be heading, what may stop us from getting there, and how to use the benefits to minimize the downsides. The good news is that we may enter a future that's so fantastic, it's unbelievable. The bad news is that many of us don't believe it, and so we may not be ready to cope. By revealing the threads that tie our fate to new technologies, this book helps us get ready. First, we have to ask the right questions. Mulhall emphasizes that this book defines those questions, rather than pretending to have quick or detailed answers. Here are examples: Molecular technologies aren’t just confined to a few university think tanks. Nor are they confined to an elite among the superpowers, big business, or government. Their roots are embedded in the fabric of our industries, research institutes, and military. They are found in wealthy and poor nations alike. The foundations for these technologies are so pervasive that it’s hard to describe them without starting an encyclopedia. Our Molecular Future condenses this knowledge and gives us broad overviews of who’s doing what, where. By so doing, the book shows us why these technologies pose such deep challenges to conventional thinking about business and environment. Yet, how vulnerable is this technological juggernaut to being thrown backward or blasted down the wrong path by nature’s violent attacks? In ninety seconds, the Great Kanto Earthquake annihilated Japan’s centralized economy in 1923. It was so severe that the country was in no shape to weather the Great Depression. Such instability helped open the door for a military government. After the military took over, war in Southeast Asia—and then the Pacific—broke out. Might this recur today? What about similar such risks in America? What if the largest earthquake in America’s history was to hit again? Surprisingly, it didn’t occur in San Francisco, or on the quake-prone West Coast. Our Molecular Future reveals the location and the implications. Property loss is increasing worldwide, due to unrestricted development in risky hurricane and earthquake zones. Perversely, this can actually improve economic conditions for some sectors in the short term, by fueling construction booms after disasters. Such short-term rebounds are often generated by insurance settlements. Yet underneath, a cancer grows. This foundation for economic stability—insurance—is collapsing. Our Molecular Future reveals the depth of the situation. To inoculate ourselves against nature’s occasional tantrums, and avoid collapse of the insurance industry, we may have to construct powerful molecular defenses. Yet, these defenses themselves may threaten our existence, due to their potential for abuse. Some say that the risks outweigh the potential gains. So, if it’s such a risk, why go there? Evidence suggests there may be no alternative. Our Molecular Future explains why. By tracing disruptions of the past and advances of the present through to technologies of the future, it becomes more than a book: it's a whole new field of study; a multifaceted approach to our past, our present, and our potential futures. Because of this, the book appeals to a wide range of readers. Read it if you are... ...striving to understand the molecular world that we may soon live in ...wondering about your job prospects or health care in an age of disruptive technologies ...looking for ways to cope with climate extremes or natural disasters The book also has special relevance if you’re one of these individuals: A business or economics student: Here are ideas about what startups might flourish in a molecular economy. "Genetic computing" may make most manufacturing processes and patents obsolete. Moreover, new industries might emerge from our capacities to cope with natural hazards. A lecturer or student in environment, natural science, and ethics. The book is a valuable supplement to course materials: --For environment, it identifies challenges to the Precautionary Principle and the doctrine of sustainable development. --For natural science, it summarizes new discoveries about naturally occurring climate changes and ecological disruptions that are changing our views about the stability of the natural world. --For scientific ethics, it gives an overview of the ethical questions associated with development of powerful new tools. An executive positioning your company for the approaching molecular era. Here is information about startups that might flourish in a molecular economy. An insurer or corporate manager who plans disaster recovery strategies. This summarizes natural risks and technologies that may alter the way that businesses prepare for them. A health care provider. Research into nanobacteria and robotic surgery may alter the way we treat disease. A scientist confronted by environmental opposition to your technologies: Here's one way out of the impasse between the life sciences and environmentalists. An environmentalist who forecasts how technology might alter the ecology: Molecular technologies and natural changes may upend the Precautionary Principle and the doctrine of sustainable development. The book also has an extensive index and endnotes, with links to authoritative Web sites.


From the Author
In this book, I argue that it's time for us to consider the unbelievable, without ridiculing it, and without being adamant that one future or the other will actually occur. That's where speculation and prediction differ. Speculation looks at possibilities. Prediction pretends that a specific future will occur. This book makes no predictions. Rather, it looks at possibilities for using science to protect us from potentially devastating natural hazards. It especially focuses on the right questions that we might ask to find such solutions. Yet this is far from being just speculative. The roots of those possibilities and strategies lie in the technological renaissance that we're now experiencing. Some of the natural threats that our technologies may protect us against are only now being discovered. Some of the tools that may protect us from those threats are still to be invented, but their foundations exist today. In these pages, we explore a vast swath of terrain. For readers interested in details on a particular topic, I provided endnotes that lead to work by scientists who are far more qualified to make their case. They are the ones who are driving the discovery machine.


From the Inside Flap
What Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was to the twentieth century, Our Molecular Future may be to the twenty-first. --What will happen to our jobs, health care, and investments when the molecular revolution hits? --How might artificial intelligence transform our lives? --How can molecular technology help us cope with hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters? Our Molecular Future explores intriguing possibilities that might answer these questions and many others. Douglas Mulhall describes the exponential changes that may be wrought by the nanotechnology and robotic revolutions. Based on discoveries of today, they promise to reduce the scale of computing to the nanometer—a billionth of a meter—while increasing computing power to almost unimaginable levels. The resulting convergence of genetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence may give us seemingly unbelievable, but nonetheless feasible capacities to transform our environment and ourselves. In the not-so-distant future, our world may include machines that scour our arteries to prevent heart disease, cars and clothes that change color at our whim, exotic products built in our own desktop factories, and enhancements to our personal financial security despite greatly accelerated obsolescence. On the other hand, none of that may occur. While technology is making these leaps, we may also encounter surprises that throw us into disarray: climate changes, earthquakes, or even a seemingly improbable asteroid collision. These extremes are not the nightmare scenarios of sensationalists, Mulhall stresses, nor are many of them human induced. Instead, they may be part of nature’s cycle—recurring more often than we’ve thought possible. The good news is that this confluence of technological transformation and new information about nature's threats may work to our advantage. If we’re smart, according to Mulhall, we can use molecular machines to protect ourselves from nature’s worst extremes, and harness their potential benefits to usher in an economic renaissance. Praise for Our Molecular Future: "Both intriguing and terrifying. I’m glad to have Mulhall’s lucid thinking as a guide to this new territory." — Rena F. Subotnik, Phd. Center for Gifted Education Policy, American Psychological Association, author of Genius Revisited "A provocative and profoundly convincing message from the future." —Graham Hancock, archaeological journalist and author of Fingerprints of the Gods "At first it seems like science fiction. However, upon careful reading one realizes that the potential for molecular technologies to protect us from catastrophic events is real. These new tools may ultimately allow for survival and advancement of the human species in ways that were previously thought to be impractical." — Eric S. Fishman, M.D., president, 21st Century Eloquence, one of America’s largest voice recognition vendors "In a breezy, journalistic style, Our Molecular Future takes us on a tour through some of the issues that will preoccupy many minds in the decades ahead, as humanity closes in on such revolutionary technologies as machine-phase nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. These issues deserve attention!" —Dr. Nick Bostrom, Department of Philosophy, Yale University, author of Anthropic Bias " ‘Impossible’ science that can change our daily lives and thwart earth-threatening natural catastrophes—the stuff of a dozen Hollywood thrillers? … [Mulhall’s] meticulously researched and concisely written text is the thinking person’s guide to the new century." —Eric Orbom, Hollywood art director and set designer for such films as Future World, Spawn, and Deep Impact "Our Molecular Future is not just a guidebook to the future; it is a challenge to each of us to steer that future, and to grapple with its moral and ethical issues. … A compelling, thought-provoking book." —Gerard J. Fryer, Hawaii Institute of Geophysics & Planetology, University of Hawaii at Manoa "This is a vital book for those who care about the environment, society, and deploying new technology to check the destructive power of humankind" — Alan Thornton, President, Environmental Investigation Agency "This book will shake conventional environmental wisdom to its roots. … A landmark work that should be read by environmentalists and businesspersons alike." —Dr. Patrick Moore, cofounder, Greenpeace; president, Greenspirit, author of Pacific Spirit "Mulhall offers a tantalizing glimpse of a nanotech future in which—to ensure the survival of our society—the tiniest of machines join battle with natures greatest warriors—volcanic supereruptions, giant tsunamis, and impacting asteroids." —Bill McGuire, Benfield Grieg Professor of Geohazards and director, Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre, University College London, author of Apocalypse. This visionary link between future technology and nature's past disasters is a valuable guide for every one of us who wants to be prepared for the twenty-first century.


About the Author
Douglas Mulhall is a technology journalist and sustainable development specialist with years of experience developing adaptive technologies internationally. He has managed European scientific institutes and built field research facilities from Asia to Latin America. Many networks have broadcast his award-winning documentary films. He co-founded a national television network in Eastern Europe. His work has been published by, for example: Financial Times Books; The Futurist magazine; Futures Research Quarterly; the European Commission; Water, Environment, and Technology magazine; and newspapers in Germany, Brazil and North America.


Excerpted from Our Molecular Future : How Nanotechnology, Robotics, Genetics and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our World by Douglas Mulhall. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On February 14, 2002, a four foot tall humanoid robot named Asimo stepped up a stairway to the podium, clapped its hands, then pressed a button that rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, thereby becoming the first robot to ceremonially preside over the daily resumption of America's financial heartbeat. A decade earlier, an artificial intelligence scientist named Vernor Vinge predicted that in thirty years, thinking machines would mark the beginning of the transition from Homo sapiens to another species. Four years later, world chess champion Garry Kasparov lost to a computer, calling it an 'alien intelligence'. Then came Asimo. Was this a trend? Yes it was. And it is today. Yet the challenge we have with such technology is that many of us don't know why we should risk it. Why try to explore the unknown if we don't know what we want to see at the other end? What do we want to achieve in this immense universe? As in the past, the struggle has become ethical. Churches condemn the life sciences, animal rights groups vilify researchers, and religious extremists force women back into veils. It's a crazy combination of rushing towards the future and bouncing off of it. What might spark us to free ourselves and embrace a future-oriented perspective, including the risks that come with it? In the past it's been great undertakings such as building a nation, exploring new physical frontiers, or engaging in self-induced calamities such as world wars. But many of us perceive that nations are out of room, frontiers such as deep oceans or deep space are unfriendly for large populations, and world war has become too horrendous to contemplate as a moral crusade. So what might get us fired up? As with many great undertakings, the inspiration may come from a shock. That shock may be far greater than the attacks of September 11, 2001. Instead of emanating from ourselves, it may come from our environment - not only because of what we may do to it, but rather because of what it may do to us. The relatively calm natural conditions that allowed our technological society to develop during past centuries may be more rare than we thought. They may end. We know that in earlier millennia, grasslands became deserts and coastlines were inundated. It now seems that such transitions occurred more rapidly than we once believed. We're still uncertain about what triggered them, but we know that it was something besides human intervention. Thus, our next great motivation may come from an age-old necessity: adapting to immense natural upheavals. As we'll see, our technological infrastructures seem ill prepared to tolerate such onslaughts. If these sweeping changes were to recur, they could destabilize the technologies that support our society. This poses a deep challenge for each of us, but especially for scientists and environmentalists. On one hand, we may try to keep nature's dynamic environment in a 'sustainable' state through laissez faire methods that purportedly blend with nature. On the other, we may use activist approaches such as those now advocated for correcting human-generated imbalances. Yet, what if both methods miss the elephant in the room? How do we 'balance' an environment that generates its own monumental natural house-cleanings? We may soon be caught between two types of disruption. One is wrought by natural cycles. The other is generated by our own technologies. These differ in at least one aspect: Nature's big upheavals give us scant control over our fate. Human technologies—though volatile and risky—offer at least some potential for self-determination. As the future races at us more quickly, we're pressed to accelerate the rate at which we prepare for the unknown. Thus, the role of speculation takes on added importance. This poses a dilemma: To keep up with the onrushing future, we have to consider possibilities that may seem like science fiction, and may seem unbelievable to many of us. Because this renaissance is proceeding at a blindingly rapid pace, we face potential outcomes—good and bad—other than high technology ones. The chances of our advances being stopped or destabilized are real. Once we solve the questions posed in these pages, we may be equipped to avert such instability and proceed into an enlightened future. Until then, in the words of one individual quoted in this book: "If it doesn't sound like science fiction, then it's probably wrong". For example, the leap from horse-drawn carriages to desktop fabricators took only a century. Digital machines represent a logical progression from telegraphs, televisions, and computers. Yet this time, these technologies may transform what we are rather than what we do. The good news is that the molecular age may let us connect our actions more directly with consequences arising from them. For example, in the future, each of us may have the power to synthesize food in a desktop factory without having to raise or kill an animal. Thus, as manufacturing becomes compressed in time and space, many of its consequences, beneficial or otherwise, are going to be right in front of us, rather than in a factory barn a thousand miles away. On the other hand, we might choose to ignore the consequences of our actions by using designer drugs concocted in our desktop factories, to keep us healthy yet zoned-out... In many ways it's still a blank page. But we don't have much time before that page is filled in. Each of us, not only scientists, has to think about that. This book aims to stimulate the process by describing, in plain language, the contradictory challenges that we face.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

When Mulhall sees the future, he pictures every home having a virtually cost-free desktop fabricator, not unlike an ink jet printer, that is able to create any three-dimensional object desired; he envisions being able to change the color of a car, or clothes, simply by speaking. Mulhall, who heads an environmental software consultancy, believes that nanotechnology, the ability to rearrange individual atoms, will lead to technological advances that will change every aspect of our world, including our own species. Mulhall' s exuberance, however, does not fully compensate for his repetitiveness and lack of specificity when he postulates that nanotechnology will lead to such leaps forward in computing power that we will soon create robots capable of independent thought, emotional response and reproduction. We will, he argues, soon be faced with a new species, Robo sapiens, and be forced to deal with the issue of "robot rights." Mulhall urges readers to foster this technology because he believes that it is the only way humans will be able to combat what he claims are the most pressing threats facing our species: massive earthquakes, immense tsunamis capable of inundating the entire east coast of North America and asteroid collisions of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs. In the end, Mulhall's musings seem more science fiction than science; they are entertaining, but not particularly thought provoking. (Apr.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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