While I haven't seen either of those, I have just started to read/review
the UK edition (Oxford UP) of VISIONS: HOW SCIENCE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE
21ST CENTURY, by the superstring theorist and science populariser Dr Michio
Kaku. I haven't read enough to get a proper sense of it, but it's a tad
cataloguish for my tastes, a bit plodding and list-ridden. But that might
make it easy for journos to grab sound-bites from. His basic schema
projects a consensus view (drawn, he repeatedly tells us proudly, from
interviews with 150 `leading scientists', including more than few
Nobelists) of life in the next 5 or 10 years, by 2020, and after 2050. He
expected conscious AI only after the middle of the century, and is rather
dismissive of Drexlerian nanotech. But he does keep emphasising
exponential change in a properly Spikish manner.
Anyone else reading Kaku?
Damien Broderick