Metamodern » On the reading stand

My next book: Radical Abundance, 2012

Eric Drexler — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:23:32 +0000

I’m now working on a new book, Radical Abundance, scheduled for publication in 2012 by PublicAffairs. The book has a wide scope in both its content and intended audience, addressing scientists, a general reading audience, and thought leaders in the policy arena.

Radical Abundance will integrate and extend several themes that I’ve touched on in Metamodern, but will go much further. The topics include:

The nature of science and engineering, and the prospects for a deep transformation in the material basis of civilization.
Why all of this is surprisingly understandable.
A personal narrative of the emergence of the molecular nanotechnology concept and the turbulent history of progress and politics that followed
The quiet rise of macromolecular nanotechnologies, their power, and the rapidly advancing state of the art
Incremental paths toward advanced nanotechnologies, the inherent accelerators, and the institutional challenges
The technologies of radical abundance, what they are, and what they will enable
Disruptive solutions for problems of economic development, energy, resource depletion, and the environment
Potential pitfalls in competitive national strategies; shared interests in risk reduction and cooperative transition management
Steps toward changing the conversation about the future

These topics interweave to make what will, I think, be a compelling story for readers with diverse interests, backgrounds, and concerns.

Update: As I mention in the comments, I’ll be posting the news on the blog when pre-orders are available, and inviting participation in pre-launch activities.

Publishers interested non-English-language rights please direct queries to Rosa at GeographicEngine dot com.

Nanosystems for India

Eric Drexler — Fri, 06 May 2011 23:05:02 +0000

Wiley India publishes textbooks “catering to the needs of Indian students”, and now offers Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, the book I wrote on the principles and potential components, architectures, and implementation pathways for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing systems.

Here’s a list of Indian distributors.

Wiley India, a branch of John Wiley & Sons, the original publisher, placed the book with the Wiley Precise Textbook series,

a uniquely designed series to help students in scoring well in the examinations as the content is exactly as per the prescribed syllabi. The focus of this series is to explain the concepts supported by examples for easy understanding.

I’m not sure that Nanosystems entirely fits this description, but I won’t complain. Indian readers are frequent (and thorough!) readers of what I’ve posted here at Metamodern and at E-drexler.com.

If you don’t have a shipping address in India, try Amazon.

Sample chapters,
detailed table of contents,
and glossary

See also:

The Physical Basis of High-Throughput Atomically Precise Manufacturing

For the next Nobel Prize in Medicine, I nominate…

Eric Drexler — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:13:41 +0000

During a three-month test across eight hospitals, several continents, and almost 4,000 patients, a new technology reduced serious surgical complications by 36% and deaths by almost 50% — in raw numbers, over 150 cases of severe harm and nearly 30 patient deaths.

This performance was demonstrated in the spring of 2008 with the prototype version of the technology, applied indiscriminately to surgeries of all kinds — a prototype without the specialized features that would improve performance in (for example) abdominal, cardiac, or neurosurgical procedures.

The surgeon who spearheaded the development and deployment of this technology should, in my view, be the leading candidate for the next Nobel Prize in Medicine. He has earned it, and awarding the Nobel Prize for this accomplishment would speed the adoption of a technology proved to save lives in settings that range from leading surgical centers in the US and UK to a remote hospital in Tanzania.

The prototype hardware consists of a sheet that lists 19 carefully engineered steps. The first step after sign-in — proved by testing to be crucial — is a pause in which the members of the surgical team simply introduce themselves to one another by name.

The Checklist Manifesto:
How to Get Things Right

The name of this innovative surgeon is Gul Gawande, and he’s told the story of the technology in an excellent and many-faceted book, The Checklist Manifesto.

It’s a good read that offers concrete and compelling insights into why buildings stand and aircraft seldom fall out of the sky. Ultimately, it’s about cognition, complexity, knowledge-sharing, and team coordination, all vividly illustrated with stories of surgery gone wrong (and right) and extended in surprising directions with tales of success that range from methodical heroism in modern aviation to methodical investment in high-tech venture capital.

I had planned to skim the book, but after picking it up yesterday I read it cover to cover.

A carefully engineered checklist is a high-value medical technology by any measure you choose. It averts injury, saves lives, saves money, improves morale, and reduces staff turnover. It costs virtually nothing. Only inertia holds it back, and what the humble checklist needs most now is an infusion of glamor and excitement. A Nobel Prize for Dr. Gawande would do more than recognize accomplishment: It would give a boost to a critical technology that could save your life.

Here’s the journal article:
“A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population” (New England Journal of Medicine, 2009).
PDF here.

Incentive engineering v. Econ 101 (creativity, criminality, etc.)

Eric Drexler — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:13:03 +0000

About a book and a paper…

The economics I encountered (in what were considered to be humanities courses) at MIT presented theories of productive behavior illustrated with graphs of relationships between supply and demand, prices, utilities, consumer surpluses, deadweight losses, and so on. These are elementary parts of the apparatus of neoclassical economics, a soaring achievement of the human intellect that delivers both powerful insights and deep misconceptions about the nature of the world.

Traditional economics assumes that rewarding a behavior will encourage it. A good model for firms, perhaps, but often exactly wrong for individuals. In particular, it prescribes the wrong way to manage productive creativity.

Traditional economic models also fail when individuals can profit enormously from fraud that destroys the corporation they control. Analyzing this as “an agency problem” or a problem of “asymmetric information” doesn’t capture the nature and scope of creative criminality.

Productive creativity

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink explores the conflicts between conventional reward systems and the internal motivations that drive creative work and weave the fabric of social life. The research is fascinating, and buttressed by real-world experience. The book delivers insights from modern behavioral economics, together with advice and examples of how businesses can sustain rather than destroy the inner drive that sustains creative work and social bonds.

This requires a delicate touch, recognizing that paying for results can transmute what people enjoy doing into grudging work that produces results of the wrong kind.

You can spend money in a loving relationship, but money can’t buy you love.

Drive provides a good and enjoyable overview of advances in knowledge that can tip the balance between success and failure in business, shift the balance of satisfaction and misery in life, and change thinking about social policy.

Creative criminality

The math and graphs of Econ 101 also omit other aspects of incentives and creativity. There is, I think, good evidence for a disconnect between reality and the economic assumptions behind widespread regulatory policies:

A criminogenic environment is one that has strong positive incentives to engage in crime. While economists stress incentive structures, economics ignores criminogenic environments. … the neo-classical economic theory of corporate law is bad economics because it is bad criminology.¹”

1. WK Black, “Reexamining the Law and Economics Theory of Corporate Governance.”
Challenge. Vol. 46, No. 2, March/April: 22-40 (2003).

The above is from a 2005 paper by William K. Black. What I found striking about its analysis of the causes of financial collapse is that 2005 preceded 2008.

You may dislike reading it as much as I did.

See also:

Reviews of related books

How many minds produce knowledge (and how they don’t)

Eric Drexler — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:31:52 +0000

How groups think
and how to do it better

A review of Infotopia

I’ve been discussing problems with public information and ways to improve it with Michael Nielsen, and on this topic, he recommended Infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge by Cass Sunstein. Having just finished reading it, I recommend it too.

With a solid grounding in experiments and studies of group behavior (and enlightened common sense), Sunstein explores how groups and societies succeed and fail in what is arguably their most vital task: drawing out and assembling pieces of knowledge that are scattered among many minds. When this process of knowledge integration succeeds, groups can understand, decide, and act with knowledge and wisdom that exceeds that of any of their members.

When knowledge integration fails or goes astray, however, groups can perform worse than even their average members, and sometimes worse than any member.

The results of Suntein’s exploration are sobering, but the opportunities for improvement are staggering. If the knowledge and recommendations that Sunstein offers us were widely known and applied, blunders in group decision making would become substantially less common. These blunders range in size from small to large, and by “large blunders” I mean disastrously wrong decisions at the trillion-dollar, fate-of-nations level.

Infotopia is broad, describing, comparing, and analyzing a range of processes that draw on the power of many minds:

Group deliberation

Polling

Conventional markets

Prediction markets

Open source development

Blogging

Wikis and Wikipedia

Sunstein helps us understand how these process operate and why they work and don’t work under various circumstances. Perhaps the most disturbing result is that deliberative discussion by groups often doesn’t work — that it fails to elicit information from its members, and that, under typical conditions, deliberation is more likely to amplify errors than to correct them.

In addition to diagnosis, Sunstein offers recommendations for improvement, some that a reader can apply next afternoon at work, and others that would involve changing how organizations operate.

Knowledge matters. Decisions matter. If your work or interests involve either, I think you’d enjoy reading Infotopia, and forever after, be glad that you did.

(I recently reviewed another book by Cass Sunstein, Nudge, and with similar enthusiasm.)

For other posts on knowledge about knowledge, see:

A Map of Science

How to Learn About Everything

How to Understand Everything (and Why)

The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering

Science and Engineering: A Layer-Cake of Inquiry and Design

A Telescope Aimed at the Future

Exploratory Engineering:
Applying the predictive power of science
to future technologies

An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

Eric Drexler — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:23:44 +0000

Whole Earth Discipline:
An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

This week, with the help of Viking Press, Stewart Brand has offered the world an important book on the collision between humanity and the Earth’s limits — on the facts, the problems, the passions, the politics, and the realistic possibilities for better outcomes.

After Whole Earth Discipline appeared in my mail, I opened it and skimmed a few random pages. I consistently encountered substantial — often striking — new information and insights on topics where I’d been reading and following developments for years. Surprised, I did this a few more times, and then more, reading further. Fresh. Important. Wise. Readable and information-dense.

Stewart was the founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, becoming a leading figure in the emerging environmental movement, years before the first Earth Day. Concerns about the whole earth have been a thread woven through a life in which Stewart has engaged areas ranging from sustainable communities to space development, from helping with the first public demo of a hypertext system to helping global corporations formulate business strategies for a turbulent and unpredictable world.

In Whole Earth Discipline his topics include genetic engineering, nuclear power, climate engineering, economic development, and the competing ideologies that surround them. In all of this, Stewart is politically sensitive and (in my view) overwhelmingly correct, yet far from politically correct. He kicks intellectual butt on both sides of most issues, but does so respectfully and from a principled moral center that itself demands respect.

Beyond its presentation of fascinating specific facts, and beyond its treatment of topics that could be books in themselves, Whole Earth Discipline is a book about how to think more coherently and effectively about what may be the greatest challenge of our time.

It may make a difference. I hope so.

Conflict of interest disclosure: I’ve known Stewart for 30 years, we’ve exchanged favors, and the publisher bribed me by sending a pre-publication copy of his book. (My deep approval, however, does not come that cheaply.)

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything

Eric Drexler — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:11:56 +0000

Gordon Bell, a long-time leader and innovator in the world of computation, has immersed himself in a life-changing experiment. Bits and pieces of news about it have been circulating for years, and his new book, just published, gives a full picture. In brief, Gordon records and indexes what he sees, hears, and more — and not as a diary, but as a working tool for living. With the resources of Microsoft behind the experiment, Gordon is exploring a future years ahead of the anticipated mass-market technologies. He calls the system “MyLifeBits”.

As the laziest possible review, I’ll just quote my blurb from the book:

Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell paint a vivid and personal picture of a revolution that is already in progress, a revolution that will transform our future by making our past transparent. Clear, detailed, and permanent knowledge of ourselves and others will change the fiber of our lives and societies, pervasively, from meal planning to constitutional law. If we are blind to the implications, we’ll be trying to solve the wrong problems with obsolete tools. Total Recall will open eyes, and the more, the better.

Total Recall is worth reading.

The Paradox of Choice

Eric Drexler — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:24:03 +0000

Why More is Less

In standard theories of rationality, it is practically axiomatic that having more choices is always better. It should come as no surprise that this isn’t true of real human beings: Too much choice can make us miserable.

In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Barry Schwartz unfolds a broad picture of the perversities of choice, and these are more extensive than I would have guessed. His examples range from shopping to life-changing decisions, and his angles of view on the subject range from personal experience to human history, psychology, and economic theory. The themes overlap with those in a book I reviewed and recommended earlier, Predictably Irrational.

The insights presented in The Paradox of Choice should influence choices about choices at many levels. At the broadest level, they call into question assumptions about aspects of freedom, abundance, and happiness that are embedded deep in the foundations of modern economic and political thought. At a personal level, Schwartz distills research about choice, attitudes, and psychology to suggest how we might live our lives with more satisfaction. (Do you approach choices as a maximizer, or as a satisficer?)

The Paradox of Choice, like Nudge and Predictably Irrational, is a book about a topic of general importance, written by a leading researcher in the field, and highly readable. I recommend it.