an army of davids

In An Army of Davids the book about Glenn Reynolds looking into the future of personal technology over mass technology. This will not bring benefits only to the phone and laptop who will be the main consumers of the new. Now, if you know Reynolds from his Instapundit website, you might think that his book is mainly about blogging and bloggers. Actually, blogging plays such a small part in its scheme that it's hardly worth mentioning. Reynolds covers lots of technological changes in such diverse fields as video games, nanotechnology, space travel, and life extension. The internet, that computing power has exploded in scope, and that advances in genetic knowledge are making life longer and more comfortable. It's to know the past and the present than the future.

In the old time you had to go to libraries, look things up, perhaps sit and wait while a book was fetched from storage. What knowledge there was spent most its time on a shelf. And if knowledge was going to be organized and dispersed, it took a big organization to do it.Now, in this day it is true that you can find a lot of information more quickly and easily on the internet these days. But Reynolds has completely confused the efficiency of knowledge distribution with the having of knowledge. Why is it knowledge when no one is looking at it in one place but not knowledge when no one is looking at it in another?

I think there were some very good sections in this book. The section dealing with blogging did provide a challenge that the Goliaths of the world ought to consider. The section on horizontal knowledge did a good job of showing how information is increasingly moving horizontally, between groups of loosely-coordinated people, rather than vertically as in the past. Reynolds does prove, to some degree at least, that because of new technologies, the little guy is empowered in a way that was impossible in the past. Right in the middle, just as the book is beginning to come together, it takes a strange turn and it began to evoke memories of my childhood friend.

Reynolds leaves behind media and blogging and begins to fantasize about nanotechnology and life in space. You have to read it to believe it, but there is a long, detailed section of the book discussing the future colonization of Mars and a 4,000 ton Chinese spacecraft powered by nuclear explosions (not to be confused with a nuclear reactor). He even provides a primer on how we can prepare ourselves to deal with a terrorist attack. There are a couple of half-hearted attempts to somehow make this relevant to the thesis of the book, but it simply cannot be done convincingly (unless we are to believe that China, the most-populated nation on earth, is a "David" who is tackling the American "Goliath" in the space race). The final chapter introduces the concept of "singularity," which describes "the point at which technological change has become so great that it's hard for people to predict what would come next". I think it is the point where robots take over the world and use as their fuel source and those who remain develop superpowers (and yes, Reynolds does discuss the possibilities of humans with super strength).The book concludes with these words: "The Army of Davids is coming. Let the Goliaths beware".

think I felt this book did not receive good editing. An Army of Davids rambles on through topic after topic which seem to be related to each other only as Reynolds' personal interests it is not for all the people it about the vision for Reynolds what he think.