I read Glenn’s new book on the plane back from California on Friday night (it was a red eye, but I have trouble sleeping on planes unless I’m very, very tired).

There won’t be a lot new here to anyone (like, for instance, me) who has been reading the TCS columns on which much of this is based, over the past few years. The basic theme flows throughout–how new technologies are empowering individuals, disempowering the large companies and bureaucracies that have been viewed as the future for the past couple centuries, disintermediating goods and services, and making cottage industries more economically viable.

Examples presented (among many others) are blogs taking down big media (Ra^thergate is cited), musicians marketing and selling music without big record-company contracts, passengers fighting back on September 11th and the “American Dunkirk“–the spontaneous evacuation of lower Manhattan using private vessels to ferry people across the rivers. He also talks about upcoming revolutions in technology, such as life (and in fact, youth) extension.

Even if you are familiar with much of this through reading Instapundit, it remains worthwhile to pull it all together in one place. Interestingly, the one part of the book in which the theme seems to be subsumed, at least to me, was the section on space (already reviewed by Jesse Londin). It starts off very promising, with the chapter titled “Space: It’s Not Just For Governments Any More.” And he does discuss the need for tourism and private activities, and prizes. But his obvious interest in the general topic of the future of space pulls him astray from the general message of the book, as he wanders off into terraforming, space elevators, etc. While these are interesting topics (at least to me, and many readers of this web site), it’s not clear how they relate to empowerment of individuals through advancing technology. They’re certainly unlikely to be achieved through a grass-roots, disintermediation approach–it will take a Goliath of some kind to construct them, one suspects. Perhaps the point is that they’re technologies which, once developed, whether by Davids or Goliath, in themselves might ultimately empower individuals to become space colonists.

If that was the point, I suppose that it’s a useful one, but we’re a long way from either of those kinds of capabilities (though space elevators are probably more feasible in the next few decades than terraforming Mars). I would have liked to see more discussion of the near term, and how we can do more with existing technologies, as space-enthusiast Davids, to slay (or at least get the attention of) the Goliath that is the federal space policy establishment (and yes, the problem is much bigger than NASA).

There’s also one technical error (in my opinion). In the section on Orion, he claims that chemical rockets don’t scale up well, whereas Orion does. I suspect that this guy would be surprised to learn that large chemical rockets are harder to build (though they’re certainly harder to raise the money to build). In fact, I’ll shock many long-time readers by saying that heavy-lift vehicles do make sense, with this caveat–they must have a large market (the failure of ability to imagine one on the part of investors, whether government or private, was Sea Dragon’s downfall). Larger vehicles have less proportion of their weight as “overhead” (e.g., avionics, controllers, valves and plumbing, etc).

That quibble noted, though, I do highly recommend the book. It is indeed thought provoking (and I’m sure that my thoughts would have been far more provoked had I not already been thinking about these things for the entire young millennium). Those who are unfamiliar with these topics will find some interesting linkages between seemingly disparate trends, and much to ponder about the future directions of those trends. For only seventeen bucks plus shipping, as a valuable glimpse of the future, it’s a bargain. But it could be an even better deal–Amazon should bundle it with a slingshot.

Western Union sent its last telegram last week.

Joe Katzman say they’re part of the Air Force’s future. With civilian applications. I’d love to see dirigibles come back, with modern materials, as aerial cruiseships. I think there’d be a big market for them.

Lileks isn’t impressed with the latest doomsaying trope from the scientifically illiterate.

This is the same kind of blinkered and dyspeptic mentality that says we shouldn’t expand life into the universe. And here and here are some related golden oldies.

Speaking of evolution, our modern car technology seems to be breeding lousy drivers:

Fewer than 30 of those questioned in a recent survey knew what anti-lock brakes were, and less than 5 percent understood traction control. To test some skills of the average driver, the U.K.

The latest, year-end Carnival of Tomorrow is up, and has a number of very interesting links (of which mine is undoubtedly the least interesting). Hard to believe that we’re already almost four years into the new century, and millennium, and while we don’t yet have flying cars, in many other ways, we’re living in the science-fiction future of our childhoods, at least for those baby boomers among us.

Here’s a good Internet equivalent of a “man-(and woman)-in-the-street interview”–a compendium of Freeper responses to the article in the Toledo Blade about Ray Kurzweil and life extension.

The interesting thing to me will be the responses when (as one commenter put it) “a mouse lives ten years.”

They’ve sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth. I think we’re going to see one walking around in a few years.

Things are progressing nicely:

“We have demonstrated the controlled synthesis of nanostructures at levels of complexity significantly beyond any work yet reported. What we have done is the most challenging synthetic problem in these structures, and one with huge potential payoffs from both the standpoint of fundamental scientific impact and producing novel de-vices and applications.”

A robot that is self aware. Is it too early to form PETR (People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots)?

I’ll personally be interested to see if it starts touching itself improperly.

Seriously, I’ve done this experiment myself with both of my cats. They clearly recognize themselves in the mirror, because they don’t get upset (as they generally would) at the sight of another cat.