According to bestselling author and social commentator Joel Garreau, advances in genetic, robotic, information and other technologies are transforming the essence of what it means to be “human” &mdash and giving us the power to dictate the course of our evolution. On November 9, Garreau will explore this premise in his presentation for the NJIT Technology and Society Forum. It’s Garreau’s assertion that we will soon possess the ability to give humans the super powers of fictional superheroes. Will such control over our physical destiny lead to future wellbeing greater than we can imagine, or to the destruction of our species?

These concepts and questions are also the core of Garreau’s most recent book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human, published in 2005. But over the past 25 years his insightful social commentary has been even more wideranging. In The Nine Nations of North America, he describes how the continent is home not to three countries but to nine separate and powerful civilizations that paid scant attention to political boundaries in forging their respective destinies. Cited as “groundbreaking” work by The New York Times, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier points out that we are experiencing the biggest change in 150 years in how we live, work, play, pray, shop, and die. The cities of the 21st century are not technologically modified versions of urban centers such as Chicago or Philadelphia. Rather, they are more than 180 enormous new centers of commerce that have sprung up in the last 30 years — places like Silicon Valley in California and the Route 128 corridor near Boston.

Garreau is a reporter and editor at The Washington Post and principal of The Garreau Group, the network of his best sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we’re headed, worldwide. He has served as a senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University, and is a member of Global Business Network, the pioneering scenario planning organization.

Sponsored by the NJIT Technology and Society Forum Committee

For More Information: Contact Jay Kappraff, kappraff@adm.njit.edu or 9735963490 The NJIT Technology and Society Forum on the Web: http://tsf.njit.edu

NJIT welcomes attendees from Essex County College, RutgersNewark, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Sigma Xi.