Product Description

"William Bainbridge is an original thinker who navigates easily from social sciences to emerging technologies and societal aspirations. In this book, he brings to the reader all that is essential in the historic and rapid change toward science and technology convergence."

—Mihail C. Roco, Ph.D., original chairman of the U.S. National Science and Technology Council's subcommittee on Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology, key architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, and currently senior advisor for Nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation

"This book provides a sweeping, yet intimate, overview of an important, emerging area of science and technology—nanotechnology and its convergence with other areas of science and engineering. In Nanoconvergence we are provided with a view of these developments as seen through the lens of the world of William Sims Bainbridge, a visionary scientist and scholar, who has helped to frame and nurture nanoconvergence. His personal history and interests are endlessly fascinating, and include science fiction, space flight, religious cults, videogames, and a host of other areas and topics. His knowledge is extraordinary and includes expertise in the field of nanotechnology and related sciences, including biology, cognitive, behavioral and social science, and information technology. Further, he knows many of the players, including some who were mentors, others who are colleagues, and others whose funding he supervised. The strength of this book is the strength of Bainbridge's extensive, connected network, rooted in scientific, technological, and societal concerns.

It is rare to find someone who brings to the table such breadth and depth of knowledge, spanning so many of the sciences, from physics through cognition. Bainbridge is a Renaissance man who is helping to both create and elucidate the potential future worlds that confront us. Ultimately, he is a visionary who is building a roadmap for a future that we can all help to shape. He is to be commended for sharing both this map and his journey with us."

—Philip Rubin, Ph.D., CEO, Haskins Laboratories

"In a world of increasing specialization, Bainbridge offers a refreshing alternative perspective of the way nanoconvergence will help unify disparate areas of knowledge and fuel a next generation of innovation. The integration of historical and forward-looking insights, firmly grounded in the people and projects of the present, made this an enjoyable read. With Nanoconvergence, Bainbridge joins the ranks of the few authors who have succeeded in integrating insights from far flung fields of science and technology into a compelling human story."

—James C. Spohrer, Ph.D, Director, Services Research and Innovation Champion, IBM Almaden Research Center

• Explains the core principles and tools that are increasingly driving scientific and technical progress
• Previews today's rapidly converging revolutions in cognitive science: from psychology to linguistics, artificial intelligence to anthropology
• Tours the shifting border between nanotechnology and biotechnology

Nanoconvergence is the coming unification of all significant technologies based on control of structures at the nanoscale. As biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science, physics, chemistry, and material science come together, their power will increase exponentially. This book is the first authoritative but easy-to-understand guide to the coming nanoconvergence revolution—and how it may reshape your life.

In Nanoconvergence, William Sims Bainbridge tours the future of science and technology in plain, nontechnical English. Bainbridge draws on an extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge, based on his unique role at the epicenter of the nanoconvergence revolution. He successfully integrates insights from far-reaching scientific fields into a compelling human story—offering powerful insights you can use to plan your career, seek new investment opportunities, or simply understand what's coming next.

• Discover new breakthroughs in measuring, manipulating, and organizing matter at the nanoscale and the implications of those advances
• See why science fiction's view of nanotechnology is wrong and why the truth is even more exciting
• Preview new technologies built on the principles of cognitive science and enabled by nanotechnology
• Learn how nanotechnology may save Moore's Law, allowing computers to double in power every year for the next two decades
• Discover why nanoconvergence may spark a renaissance in the social sciences
• Examine the potential impact of scientific and technological convergence on human society and diversity

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #942415 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780132446433
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author

William Sims Bainbridge is one of the leading scientists exploring and popularizing the emerging field of nanoconvergence. He is the author of seventeen books and more than 200 articles in areas ranging from information science to the sociology of religion. He has been at the National Science Foundation since 1992, and currently codirects its program in Human-Centered Computing. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

This book explores the future of science and technology, and their implications for human beings. It is based on the insights of hundreds of scientists and engineers working at the cutting edge of research, as seen through the eyes of a social scientist who worked alongside them to organize, write, and edit a series of influential government-sponsored and independent reports. Although I have made every effort to be balanced and comprehensive, this book is not a sterile exercise in abstraction and objectivity. Rather, it seeks to provide information that will be both fascinating and useful for students, entrepreneurs, investors, fellow scientists or engineers, and people in many walks of life who want to understand how their work and their world will change in coming decades.

One of the scariest questions for young people is this: "What will you be when you grow up?" Sometimes people nearing retirement age joke, "I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up!" Often be means do, and the question really refers to selecting a career and finding a job. More broadly, the question might refer to what kind of person you or I might become, in whatever span of life is left to us on this spinning planet. However the question is defined, it cannot be answered in isolation. A person cannot simply decide to become a blacksmith, elevator operator, or spaceship pilot. The economy and the technological culture must provide such jobs, or no one can get them. Contrary to predictions, the trade of blacksmithing did not completely disappear, although its role in society has been greatly diminished. I suppose elevator operators became security guards--and I wonder if they considered that change to be a demotion or a promotion. I don't know what happened to all of the prospective spaceship pilots. My point is that the nature of technical work, and the nature of the world in which we all live, will change radically in the future, because science and technology have entered an era of fundamental transformation.

At the time of the "dot-com crash" nearly a decade ago, computer professionals used to joke, "Now we'll find out how many computer programmers the world really needs." The implication was that data processing had been going through a technological revolution, but after the guns had fallen silent, there might not be much action anymore. Everyone in the field had noticed that big companies and government agencies had been producing their own electronic data systems, often at great cost and with dismal results. Soon, it was believed, they would admit that the desire to have their own proprietary systems was a dysfunctional status obsession and begin to buy their software off the shelf--just as everyone else was already doing. In the early 1980s, very small companies could succeed while writing software for the consumer market, but since then a shakeout had occurred in small business and home office software. By way of analogy, in the beginning of the twentieth century, scores of small companies set out to make automobiles, but within half a century the overwhelming majority had ceased to exist. Perhaps by 2010, every business on the face of the Earth could make do with Microsoft Office.

This issue raises two questions very germane to the topic of this book: "What is computer science?" and "How can it continue to progress?" Computer science is not simply programming, nor is it the more exalted profession of software engineering, although both entities depend on it. Nor is computer science merely a branch of electrical engineering, although many people who call themselves computer scientists have a degree in "EE." Rather, computer science is an incomplete convergence of mutually supportive fields that cooperate to produce the hardware, software, and management systems required to process information, including in consumer areas such as the World Wide Web and online games, as well as in service of corporations and government agencies. As "comp-sci" matures, it draws more and more fields into it. Early on, it attracted many mathematicians; today, it needs the expertise of members of the cognitive science field and the social sciences. As this unification progresses, the field should probably be renamed simply information science. Indeed, this term is already in wide circulation, where it is used to encompass all forms of communication, whether or not they are supported by electronic devices.

We cannot be sure how much longer the electronic hardware will continue to progress. In the past, hardware advances both permitted and demanded software advances, and the evolution of the two together enabled entirely new applications. When I entered Yale University as a physics major in 1958, it was widely believed that two prominent application areas, nuclear technology and space rocketry, would rise still further to transform the world. This proved to be a miscalculation: Within 15 years, both areas had largely stalled. We still need nuclear and aerospace engineers, but now they work primarily as the paid minions of corporate executives, with very limited scope for personal innovation. The same is true for most computer professionals in large organizations. Even so, the information area has kept lively because individual entrepreneurs and small companies have continued to develop new approaches and applications. "A revolution every five minutes" is a slight exaggeration, but this period of growth and discovery could end at any time.

So what is a person to do? What I did, when I was young, was stumble from field to field for a few years, before realizing that as a social scientist I could keep innovating by applying my growing professional experience to a series of different topics, each appropriate for the decade in which I was working on it. At a recent computer science convention, a couple of corporate recruiters told me they were looking for students who knew exactly what specialty they wanted to work in, and who were gaining the precise expertise required for that niche. I was horrified to hear this. What will these companies do with these people when their specialties are no longer needed in a few years? Fire them, probably. A young person seeking a career in science or engineering today should start from the hopeful premise that the fundamental things he or she is really interested in will remain important decades later. But such a person cannot assume that particular narrow technical fields or job classifications will still exist even one decade in the future. The fact that many of the best opportunities will exist at the boundaries of fields does not mean that a student should avoid exploring one field deeply. For many, a "T-shaped" expertise will be best—that is, deep in one area but also covering adjacent areas. Often, a corporation or other technical organization will value highly a person who has solid expertise in a field central to its work, but who also possesses enough expertise in adjacent areas to contribute to a multidisciplinary team, or even to promote transfer of new ideas from one field to another. Opportunities for such a person become especially great when an entire new field is opening up.

Many physicists who happened to be mathematically inclined became computer scientists simply by redefining the expertise they already had. Others, who were better with chemistry than math, became materials scientists, and more recently redefined their expertise as nanoscience. As this book will demonstrate, nanotechnology is converging with biotechnology and information technology. Great opportunities exist for people who are prepared to build the bridges between those fields today.

Does this transdisciplinary philosophy place unreasonable demands on students, asking them to add extra work to the full-time job of learning one field well? Not necessarily, if their teachers also evolve with the changing conditions in science and technology. Much of the "expertise" in many fields consists of brute, dumb facts, often in the form of unnecessary nomenclatures. The unification of the sciences and branches of engineering requires a transformation of their styles and cultures. Part of that transition will be achieved by easy-to-use information technology systems that replace the arcane technical handbooks of the past. Part of it will be achieved by new terminology and analytic or design procedures that can be applied broadly across fields. And part of it will be achieved by the development of new professions specifically designed to bridge between specialized branches of expertise.

When I earned my doctorate in sociology from Harvard University in 1975, with a dissertation on the social history of the space program, I was lucky to get a job in the tenth-ranked sociology department in the country, because the job market was in the process of crashing. Enthusiasm for the social sciences began to dwindle at that time, and today the social sciences (except economics, if you want to count that "rich" field among the social sciences) have less influence than they did in the 1950s and 1960s. Coincidentally, 1975 also marked the end of the remarkably vigorous post-war growth of U.S. universities. Put bluntly, it is hard to name any clear-cut discoveries achieved in the social sciences comparable to the feats achieved in genetics, for example, over the same period. And yet, public confidence in political leaders is justifiably low at the present time, and advanced societies face many policy decisions, including some concerning which technologies to promote or prohibit. We would be better off today if the social sciences were more influential, and if they had earned that position on the basis of solid achievements based on actual scientific discovery. Ultimately, winning such respect will require the social sciences to become integrated with the cognitive sciences, on the basis of a shared understanding of human behavior.

This book has two themes. One is clearly stated in the title: Nanoconvergence. Today, nanotechnology is converging on the one side with information technolog...

Customer Reviews

B- High School Science Report
I was quite excited by the prospect of this book because my area of research is essentially a convergence of 3 of the four fields he mentions. However, the book is written as if by an average 11th grader who really knows how to use the internet. Within the first two pages this is obvious as he already talks about the number of times the word "nano" is used in recent publications. So then I read the biography on the author and find out he has a PhD in Sociology. Which is basically all you need to know about how the book reads. He is all over the place, random ideas pop up at the end of paragraphs about completely different topics and then he goes to something entirely different. He spends half the book talking about himself and why basically everything important in science in this century has been a byproduct of his work or that of his friends.

I don't even want to qualify this as popular science as true popular science is interesting and actually provides real facts. Furthermore, books such as the two written by Brian Greene provide objective scientific fact and realistic statements at a level that is understandable by a non-expert. This book was written by a sociologist about science and engineering, i.e. a book by someone who has no idea what he is talking about trying to "dumb" it down for the masses.

This book randomly makes detours into why the author is anti-religion and then he repeatedly quotes the bible. Not that quoting the bible makes one religious, but he does so in a way that is highly contradictory. He talks about how freedom in science is important to creativity and that innovators in fields should be rewarded for the work they do and then about how all work must benefit "mankind" to create equality and that the government must decide what science should do. A final complaint is that the author does not know how to use the word "the". I have my theory of why he does not use it properly, but this is mostly based on the fact that he went to one of my rivals in the Ivy League.

If you are interested in reading a poorly written, poorly organized, uninformative and pretentious piece of "popular" science, then this is the book for you.

I give it two stars and not one simply because this is a topic that needs to be addressed and given more attention. Hopefully the book will bother a real scientist enough to write a real book about the subject and thus the book might have some purpose yet.