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Expression
| Kerry Herndon
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>> Published Date: 4/25/2012
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 Spring is always my favorite time. The weather is great and the market is strong. This makes me have to drive from Miami to Apopka every week. Audio-book service Audible comes to the rescue with as many books as I can listen to. Two books of near opposite appeal have been recently playing from the iPod through the car sound system. The first title I want to share is called "Life." It is the autobiography of Keith Richards, legendary lead guitar player of the Rolling Stones. I was not so inclined to download such a long book, but while browsing through the online Audible store I was compelled to click on Audible’s 2011 book of the year. How could this be? The autobiography of a rock star with a long history of severe drug addiction? Soon all was revealed. The narration was done by Johnny Depp. Yes, the Johnny Depp—and what a brilliant, superb, dazzling, utterly entertaining narration it is. Mr. Depp takes on the voice rolls of many characters from the book, making it more audio theater than standard audio book.
The theme that recurs among the highly successful groups and individuals in our global culture is years of extreme toil with little or no reward. Who wants to do that? Well, not very many of us. We want a decent quality of life, which to most of us means not working seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day. This is not unreasonable if greatness is not in your plans. Long hours and greater output now seem to be the price of just keeping our jobs.
Those of us of a certain age that think we have earned the right to do a little less of the dirty work because of our elevated experience and tenure are in for quite a shock in this new economy. We now compete in a world where large, intelligent governments have things like industrial policies and energy policies, i.e. plans for how to get from here to there. Sadly for those of us living in the United States we are not one of those countries. I refer you to any one of Thomas Freedman’s many book on the topic, with his latest coauthored "That Used to Be Us." It goes into painful detail about our lack of forward policy initiatives on anything at a high governmental level. But this is not the second book to which I earlier referred.
While my first choice is all about the pleasure of being entertained by two masters, Depp and Richards, the second is, well, a different story. "The Singularity is Near," written by the genius inventor-scientist Ray Kurzweil is that second book. I recommended the first book to my son Andrew as something he would enjoy and this second book as something he needs to read and understand. I came to this book from a lifelong friend, John, who is a Ph.D. nuclear engineer. This is his favorite book. He gave me a copy of the paper version and it was quite thick. Happily, I found it was available for download from Audible where someone would do the hard work of reading this immensely dense text.
The basic premise of the book is that we are advancing technologically at an exponential rate that will ultimately result in Mr. Kurzweil’s singularity event. That event is the transformation of humanity to a state beyond biology. That is, we will be substantially augmented with integrated biomechanical systems that will make us vastly more intelligent and productive. Oh, and we get to live as long as we want. Is that all, you say? Wait, there’s more. The new and better humanity will revere and coddle their less capable biological predecessors. They care tenderly after our ever need.
I would prefer not to spend so much effort on this book, because it is really very hard work, but Mr. Kurzweil’s past predictions have been highly accurate. While I think this is a huge issue for my children as I will be long dead before the predicted singularity in 2040, Mr. Kurzweil is doing everything he can to live long enough to live forever. I have far less insight into the computer electronics side of the book’s claims than I am comfortable with trusting completely. But I have far greater knowledge of the biology side, and if anything, the book understates human progress.
We are now on the second half of the chessboard of exponential progression in all areas of science and invention. Things are going to happen very fast. GP
Kerry Herndon owns and operates Kerry’s Bromeliad Nursery in Homestead, Florida. He can be reached at kherndon@kerrys.com.
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