Rating: 
Summary: A Great Book
Review: One of the best books I've read. Unless you plan to live in a cave for the remainder of your life, then just go ahead and read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: light content and misleading title
Review: One would expect, given the subtitle "How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth", that this book has many revelations about Genomics. But in reality the topic covers only a few pages (after compressing the meaningless and odd typesetting to normal page format).This is clearly an example of a book being dressed up for a market after it was written, rather than a book written for a market. The majority of the book makes a case for the importance of technology in general (as opposed to life sciences or genomics in particular). Its a well presented argument, but not what I expected to read given the title. If you're considering buying this book, I suggest you browse it first.
Rating:
Summary: light content and misleading title
Review: One would expect, given the subtitle "How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth", that this book has many revelations about Genomics. But in reality the topic covers only a few pages (after compressing the meaningless and odd typesetting to normal page format). This is clearly an example of a book being dressed up for a market after it was written, rather than a book written for a market. The majority of the book makes a case for the importance of technology in general (as opposed to life sciences or genomics in particular). Its a well presented argument, but not what I expected to read given the title. If you're considering buying this book, I suggest you browse it first.
Rating:
Summary: Long hour research to work-of-art book
Review: Professor Enriques compiled long-year research to this "work-of-art" book. The prophecy is based on "number", the important number, after long-hour research. Those important numbers point to the upcoming future. You'll be amazed, confused or even scared how close the future is and how cruel it will be. Again, this is the "work-of-art" book. You can finish reading in hours but you will spend week (or month) to think about what you see. I'm not sure if Professor Enriques put effort on "recognition" to make reader "think" after read his book. It works well with me anyway.
One weakness I see, however, is the way to present statistics. While I love many statistical numbers presented, many of them are irrelevant or not fit the story well. Maybe the author over estimates the readers to follow this deep thinking so he skipped many parts -leaving reader miserable.
Overall, this book is requirement for all futurism or anyone who will live tomorrow!
Rating:
Summary: Good, if you like PowerPoint
Review: The most telling phrase was in the afterword: "I apologize for simplifying so many debates and concepts." At least he knew what he was doing. I found this to be a turbulent stream of factoids, hero worship, and incomplete ideas. The author seems not to distinguish between opening a discussion and failing to finish a thought. The quantitative statements are sometimes incorrect - his decimal points seem to wander as much as the rest of the presentation. Visually, the text is a mess. Maybe he wanted it to look lively and creative, instead of putting the life into the text itself. His typographic "creativity" tops out around the Crayola level, though. It's what I'd expect of someone who just discovered all those cool controls over fonts, sizes, layout, etc., but has not yet discovered they don't all need to be used on any one page. In fact, this typography interferes with a good reader's perceptual habits. I actually like aggressive use of type, like some of David Carson's - but Carson brings visual competence to the page. The one graph (p.147) is uninformative even by USA Today standards. It would probably have Tufte spinning in his grave. (As far as I know, Tufte is alive as of this writing - that graph might well kill him.) Toffler's 'Future Shock' needs continuous replacement, because the future keeps getting here and keeps being something we didn't expect. I'm glad to see people writing about the ever-changing future. I welcome thoughtful, communicative visual presentations. This book just doesn't give me either.
Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking, More Economics than Genomics
Review: The PowerPoint text-heavy style makes for a book than can be picked up and read in a series of bursts. The genomics component was relatively new to me, but with a little research I was able to observe differences between what the author forecast in 2001 and today. Enriquez' observations and point of view on economics and education are more telling four years later, however. They provide a solid frame of reference in which to understand why the genomics "revolution" has been slowed. More importantly, the economic and education discussion offers an explanation of the widening gap between haves and have nots that helps explain current events. Simply put, societies that apply technology and value science provide the basis for immense wealth creation to take place. Societies that, in the author's words, expect the umbrella of a glorious past to protect them from forces of change driven by advancing technology are doomed to fall behind.
Immediately after this book I picked up "Dream Palace of the Arabs" and realized that many backward-looking middle eastern societies professing "love of the land" and desires to restore "homelands" are completely missing any opportunities for catching up with western culture [or at least its potential for economic productivity] and are doomed to falling further behind. Societies where poets are glorified and contributions of engineers are denigrated can't be helped by any amount of economic assistance and even those that export natural resources today will be in trouble when those source of income start to fall off. Reading As the Future Catches You with an eye toward today's headlines of unrest and resentment of the US in the middle east and misguided protests over globalization and offshoring of jobs provides deeper insight than offered by the popular [but shallow] media.
Rating: 
Summary: new idea in town
Review: There is nothing quite so chilling as the prospect of an intellectual looking ahead to the future and describing for we poor
benighted masses both how it will look and what we have to do to get there. In my own lifetime alone (a mere forty years)
this has included pronouncements that communism was a permanent rival of democracy, perhaps even its superior; that a
Silent Spring was coming; that central planning made Japan a more formidable economic power than America with its free
market economy; predictions of a new Ice Age in the sixties and, alternatively, of Global Warming in the 90's; dire warnings
of a Population Explosion followed by today's obvious underpopulation crisis; and so on and so forth, ad nauseum. In those
four short decades, I've lived through the Sexual Revolution, the Third American Reawakening, the New Age, Women's
Liberation, Animal Liberation, Black Pride, Gray Pride, Gay Pride, Handicapped Pride, the Nuclear Age, the Space Age,
the Green Revolution, the Information Age, the Digital Revolution, the Imperial Presidency, the incredible shrinking
presidency, yadda, yadda, yadda... Comes now Juan Enriquez to inform us that we're about to live through the Genomic
Age : THE DOMINANT LANGUAGE ...
AND ECONOMIC DRIVER...OF THIS
CENTURY...IS GOING TO BE
GENETICS. Those who remain illiterate in this language...
Won't understand the force making the single biggest
difference in their lives. And like all of his predecessors, Mr. Enriquez wants to make sure that we completely restructure our lives and our society
around the notion that he's right. The quotation above is in roughly the form that Mr. Enriquez uses in the book, apparently believing that in the future we'll
treasure almost random typesetting, variable capitalization, incomplete sentences and the like. Instead, this style feels
incredibly condescending, as if big print, bold lettering, and broad, easily comprehensible ideas are the only way to reach the
hoi polloi. In this spirit, Mr. Enriquez does not offer many specifics about how we can prepare for this genomic future, but those he
does include seem to indicate that he may have completely missed the point of the 20th Century. He focusses heavily on the
educational end of the equation, apparently believing that having a population that is literate in the language of genomics will
suffice to allow nations to participate in the potentially explosive economic growth that genomics may bring. But the Soviet
Union, Cuba, and many other countries expended huge amounts of energy, time, and resources on educating their people in
the science of the day and it served for nought. For one thing, what your people know really doesn't make any difference
unless they have the free institutions--capitalism and democracy--in which to utilize their knowledge. For another, states simply lack the flexibility to determine which knowledge will be needed tomorrow and government
bureaucracy is too inefficient at the actual educating process. Perhaps Mr. Enriquez is right about the long term importance
of genomics and the revolutionary economic impact it will have, but if he's not, imagine how long it will take a government,
once embarked on his project, to realize its mistake and change the emphasis of its curriculum. Mr. Enriquez himself says
that : Many are unprepared for...
The violence and suddenness with which...
New technologies change...
LIVES ...
COMPANIES ...
COUNTRIES ...
Because they do not understand what these technologies can do. Through all the "revolutions" and "ages" listed above, be they real or imagined, the one thing that remained constant in
America, though not as constant as we might like, was the adherence to the idea of freedom. The ability of democracy and
capitalism to adapt to all of these social, scientific, political, and intellectual forces seems to indicate that a climate of freedom
is the necessary condition for a society to handle these violent and sudden changes. Yet he's suggesting locking ourselves
into an education system premised on a belief that genomics is necessarily the future : that's pretty sketchy. Finally, who cares if all of us speak the genetic code, so long as enough scientists do? The digital revolution is humming
along quite nicely and not many of us are fluent in binary. There does not appear to be anything so unique about genetic
engineering that it will require widespread knowledge of the genetic code. Even if genetic manipulation allows me to grow
wings, I won't be the one doing the engineering, any more than I know how to fix my own car. There's another element to all of this that is far more sinister, and that's Mr. Enriquez's suggestion that we be prepare
ourselves philosophically and ethically to fully exploit the possibilities of genetic technology. Thus, contemplating the
prospect of human cloning, he says that : The Christian moral and ethical system is ill-equipped to address some of the choices and dilemmas
created by the genomics revolution. We may all want to pay some attention to the beliefs and consequences... Explored by religions like Hinduism and Buddhism... Where reincarnation remains a central tenet... Funny, it would seem more appropriate to me to require that uses of new technologies conform to the traditional moral
standards of Western Civilization, not that we ditch those ethical prohibitions that might inconvenience our full exploitation of
the science. If you extend Mr. Enriquez's logic to its inevitable end, doesn't our prospective ability to clone ourselves make
every one of us expendable? Why punish murder if the scientists can just duplicate us? Maybe that's the point, that this
technology holds out the promise of a world where we can finally free ourselves from the moral codes that have restrained
us for thousands of years, but is that really a consummation we wish for? It may well be that Mr. Enriquez does not mean quite what these flippant statements of his seem to mean, but the discussion
of most issues in the book is so general that it is hard to know for sure. But we do know this, liberal democratic capitalism
has proven uniquely adept at withstanding potentially transformative technologies and social movements. By allowing people
the freedom to study whatever they desire, to band together into cooperative business endeavors, to buy and sell the
products and services of their choosing, and by rewarding winners extravagantly and punishing losers harshly, the free
market has been able to route these various forces into productive channels. No matter how great the promise of genomics,
it seems awfully unlikely that our current system, or something approximating it, will not be able to deal with it quite
effectively. And because democratic capitalism is so distinctly a phenomenon of the Anglo-American world, the dominant
language of the 21st Century is likely to be the same as it was of the 20th, and the 19th, and the 18th : English, specifically
that of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Burke, Lord Acton,
etc.. And the force that makes the single biggest difference in our lives will continue to be not genomics but freedom. By all
means read the book, there's plenty here that's interesting and it's an easy enough read. But be wary of taking any of it at
face value. As a general rule, it's helpful to be profoundly skeptical of anyone who advises wholesale changes to the culture,
particularly to its moral foundations, just because there's a new idea in town. GRADE : C-
Rating:
Summary: Enhanced perspective.
Review: This book is at least as important as John Nesbitt's "Megatrends" was in the 1980's. If one gains nothing more than the enhanced perspective of our future, it will be well worth the time spent reading. The style of writing is unique and the information crammed into the book will warrant reading it for a second or third time. "Forewarned is forearmed."
Rating: 
Summary: Why reviews of this book vary from * to *****
Review: This book reads like an engaging lecture. If you're looking for an extensive and scholarly work . . . you'll give it a single *. If you're looking for a well written, extended and readable Powerpoint presentation (and I mean that in all seriousness) you'll rate this book much more highly. I was surprised by how light the book was on words/$ but was pleasantly surprised that after I'd adjusted my expectations the book was readable and engaging. And it's significantly less expensive than the thousands Enriquez probably charges to deliver this presentation in person . . .
Rating:
Summary: Don't let first appearances fool you
Review: When I first received this book and flipped through it, I was seriously tempted to send it back unread. The typesetting is... creative to say the least - lots of white space, multiple fonts, scattershot graphics. Indeed, it looks like you've received an extra long email from someone who's just discovered how to play with all the format settings. Given that I'd purchased a hard cover book at hard cover prices, I felt ripped off. However, I decided to read it anyway, and I'm glad I did. It's a short read, but a wild ride, and it's packed with information about the biotech and economic revolution we're just getting into. There are lots of facts and figures to consider, and the author does an excellent job of providing thought-provoking analogies that may change the way you look at some things. In one example, he asks you to think of mosquitoes as flying hypodermic needles - right now these insects infect people with things like malaria, but scientists are trying to figure out how to use them to innoculate people instead. This book would make an excellent Christmas gift for non-technical people who want to try to understand the potential impact of biotechnology, genetic engineering, computers, and the Internet. The choice of typesetting, it turns out, is deliberate: it's designed to convey the speed at which these changes are taking place, and it makes reading the book as easy as consuming a sound byte from the 11 o'clock news. It can get a bit heavy on the hype factor, but the author acknowledges this at the end. It should also be required reading for all the politicians, bureaucrats and other politicos involved in making decisions about things like cloning, genetically modified foods etc. These people in particular have to be able to see past the immediate 'ick factor' reaction and to the long term economic consequences of the legislation they propose. In short, its an excellent primer on the biotech revolution, and a great starting point for anyone seeking to understand what's happening. And even those who are used to, as I am, reading more technical material on this topic, it provides a good summary of what's happened to date, how technologies have converged, and what we might expect in the next decade.
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