| The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhumanism Condition | |
|---|---|
|
Author |
Ed Regis |
|
Genre |
Science, technology, transhumanism |
Recommended by Eliezer Yudkowsky (see below).
Ratings, awards, mentions and recommendations[]
Yudkowsky's recommendation[]
Books that changed my life[]
When I was but a little lad, in the days of my wild and reckless youth, I thought I would grow up to be a physicist, like my father before me (who was at that time a physicist). I'd read QED by age nine, and I even understood most of it. I was contentedly headed for a life on the frontiers of the fourteenth decimal point. Then along came a book called "Great Mambo Chicken". As I recall, it was taken out as a library book and given to me, for the duration of the loan, by a grand-uncle. Undoubtedly attracted by the title, of course. And inside this book was...
Cryonics! The colonization of space! Fun with high explosives! Humanity's conquest of the Universe! Artificial intelligence! Genetic engineering! Nanotechnology! The Omega Point! Ultratechnologies by the dozen!
I knew, in that moment, that I'd be doing one of those things for my career. (I thought it'd be nanotechnology, actually; I didn't get converted over to AI and cognitive science and computer programming until I read Gödel, Escher, Bach.) I read this book, and I realized it was possible to solve all the problems of the world, that nothing was beyond the reach of intelligence, that my generation and maybe even my grandparents' generation was going to be immortal, and I decided that I was going to help make it happen, and that's what my life would be.
Books of knowledge[]
If Gödel, Escher, Bach is an introduction to all the most beautiful knowledges in the world, then Great Mambo Chicken shows us all the coolest technologies. Bask for a moment in the table of contents: "Truax", about an independent rocket scientist out to beat NASA; "Home on Lagrange", about the L5 society and the colonization of the solar system; "Heads will roll", about cryonics, and freezing the heads of the deceased, saving all that information in the brain before it rots; "Omnipotence, Plenitude & Co.", about attaining complete control over the structure of matter on the molecular level through the agency of quintillions of molecular-level self-reproducing robots; "Postbiological Man", about the possibility of augmenting ourselves and transcending the limitations of (organic) flesh; "The Artificial Life 4-H Show"; "Hints for the Better Operation of the Universe", or how to keep the Sun (or for that matter, the Universe) from getting all dark and icky; and there's "Death of the Impossible", which is about how to do everything else.