The Coming Convergence: The Surprising Ways Diverse Technologies Interact to Shape Our World and Change the Future by Stanley Schmidt, PhD
Prometheus, $27.95, 275pp, hc, 9781591026136. Nonfiction.
Best known as the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dr. Stanley Schmidt is also a physicist, writer, musician, polymath, and thinker. This book allows him to stretch, drawing on many of his varied interests as he discusses the converging streams of human endeavor which created the rivers of technology and activity making up the world we live in. He starts off with what has come before, talking about the Jacquard automatic loom, the control mechanisms for which (punched cards) would eventually be adopted by a completely different field of endeavor, and play a major role in the development of the computer. Moving on, he notes that not all technological blends lead to happy results, and discusses specifically the development of skyscrapers and of the aviation industry, pointing out the disastrous results of September 2001. But most of his trails of thought lead to much less frightful conclusions (though many of them are still ongoing, and the possibilities for less-than-desirable outcomes are always there). Consider the combination of high-powered computation (itself a development of several converged streams) and medicine, leading to the development of diagnostics such as magnetic resonance imaging. Who would have thought that one plan to make looms work faster would result in machines that can look inside the human body in paper-thin slices to find out what’s wrong?
Schmidt was an early proponent of the impending nanotechnology revolution, and though he recognizes it is difficult to get from here down to that small scale, he knows it’s coming. The assumed uses of nanotech will completely alter the way we do just about everything we do. And as Schmidt takes the book from looking at the past to imagining the future, adding in the effects of nanotech may almost instantly bring us to Vernor Vinge’s Singularity, and thus, as a good extrapolator, Schmidt’s book thins considerably looking at the future. He acknowledges that nanotech makes almost anything possible, and instead talks about ways we can try to protect ourselves from the myriad unwanted consequences that will almost surely pop up.
But let me jump back to the meat of the back: the exploration of earlier fields of human endeavor, and how seemingly unrelated lines were crossed to create something new, and (in most cases) now utterly necessary. He doesn’t confine himself to science, but also investigates the arts (architecture, music, photography, film), because they may be even more important in defining who we are.
Thinking more about the book, perhaps it’s best viewed as a cautionary work, something to alert us to the fact that the future is coming, and it probably won’t be what we expect. As Schmidt the editor often tells writers, “Remember, you can’t just change one thing.” Everything affects something else, and the honest fiction writer, like the honest futurist, tries to see how changes and modifications interact and grow, causing the future, whether we’re ready for it or not.