My first foray into the Ludlum universe was The Ares Decision and it turned out to be a terrific experiment. Riffing off the characters of one of the genre’s masters and emulating his style were both a lot of fun and a great learning experience—even for an old hand like me. Better yet, the book came out even better than I’d expected.
So, I was excited when asked to do a follow up and I immediately started digging into the research that would become The Utopia Experiment.
Science will either be the savior of mankind or the instrument of its destruction and I’ve leaned both ways over the course of my life. The problem is, no matter how benevolent a new technology seems, someone will always find a way to use it for evil.
Human machine integration has been in the news a lot lately and it’s advancing at an ever-accelerating pace. We’re beginning to be able to connect directly to the mind—helping blind people and those who have lost limbs with a level of sophistication that only a few years ago seemed like science fiction. Also in that time, computers have gone from struggling to give us a decent game of Pong to winning Jeopardy!. And the Internet is quickly becoming the repository of all human knowledge.
The question now isn’t whether we have the data and processor speed, it’s how do we effectively access it? The answer seems clear—build it into us. But these days, every answer comes with questions and in this case they’re on a scale that humanity hasn’t faced before.
How much longer will we be able to discern where we stop and the machines begin? And, perhaps more importantly, who will control those machines?