Drivel: I just finished reading William Gibson's
All Tomorrow's Parties, which is a freakish view of the convergence of distributed communications and nanotechnology. The book read like it was written for TV or perhaps to become a movie. This is a stark contrast to
Idoru, which I also recently finished reading.
All Tomorrow's Parties wondered a little too much for my tastes and didn't get to the point or evolve the primary subject of nanotechnology until the very end. The imagery was too flashy and too vague at the same time. This said, the concept of combining robust communication with nanotechnology is quite intriguing, and very scary, as Mr. Gibson has illustrated for us with the "faxing" of a human being.
The technologies that he outlined in Idoru have been carried over and evolved. His notion of real-time, fully engaged, "net" communication are fascinating and are very close to being realized with the evolution of 3D modeling, streaming, and maturation of Virtual Reality technologies. He has set the bar very high in terms of the ability of disparate devices being able to communicate globally with little difficulty. The user interfaces that he describes being employed on these devices use input from all sensory sources. To my knowledge, nothing like these user interfaces exists today. This is not to say that the different components don't exist in nascent forms. I think a lot of investments will be made in creating these types of user interfaces over the next twenty years. What Gibson describes as a web site is a completely immersive communications experience; a far cry from today's web sites.
The final premise of the book is that nanotechnology will be able to replicate human beings. There is far too much unknown about the human brain to be able to even surmise that this would be possible. In order to replicate human beings, you would have to also replicate their memory and this means replicating at the sub-atomic levels. This is a high aspiration, but I doubt if I will see it in my lifetime.
All in all, All Tomorrow's Parties fell short of my expectations after reading Idoru. However, this does not deter me from reading more works by Gibson as I read his work as much for technological and philosophical insight as I do entertainment.
