An occasionally scattershot yet insightful report.
An unsettling warning that “personal neurotech devices,” now carried by 1 in 5 Americans, will soon expose our innermost thoughts to the world.
Studies show that most users are happy to allow access to findings from their smartwatches, fitness trackers, and electronic sensors in exchange for modest benefits: discounts, entertainment, personal statistics, etc. Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke, finds this unnerving. However, she is no prophet of doom, pointing out that startups are creating plenty of useful devices. Thousands of truck and train drivers wear SmartCaps that monitor brain waves, informing them (and their bosses) if they are sleepy or distracted. Future wearables will forewarn epileptics of a seizure, detect early signs of brain disease such as Alzheimer’s, and perhaps enhance mental powers. Unfortunately, nothing in the Constitution or any U.S. or international law gives individuals sovereignty over their minds. “With our DNA already up for grabs and our smartphones broadcasting our every move,” writes the author, “our brains are increasingly the final frontier for privacy.” Relying heavily on John Stuart Mill and admirable if unenforceable U.N. statements on human freedom, Farahany casts a gimlet eye on current neurotechology, an exuberant field led by China, whose government’s obsession with an obedient citizenry is producing Orwellian electronics that American startups ignore at their peril. Traditional biometrics (fingerprints, facial IDs) can be faked, but wearable brain biometrics can accurately identify and monitor individuals over time. Popular drugs such as Adderall enhance brain function, but external devices that feed back brain waves, as well as implantable electrodes, work better. Will it be cheating to use them? Farahany delivers the pros and cons. Less pertinent to her thesis is her investigation of transhumanism, a flourishing movement that aims to push humans into the “next stage” of evolution by overcoming aging and death and supercharging brains to compete with AI and uploading them to computers to achieve immortality.
An occasionally scattershot yet insightful report.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781250272966
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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