Humans may soon have the super powers of superheroes now found only in comic books and movies, says bestselling author and social commentator Joel Garreau, who is also a Washington Post editor and reporter. Garreau will speak 4:00-5:30 p.m on Nov. 9, 2006 at the Campus Center of New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). The public is invited to the talk which is part of NJIT’s Technology and Society Forum series http://tsf.njit.edu. Garreau will explore how advances in genetic, robotic, information and other technologies are transforming what it means to be “human” — and giving people the power to dictate the course of their evolution.  Will such control over one’s physical destiny lead to future well-being greater than anyone can imagine, or to the destruction of the species?

Garreau is a 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. 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.

Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human (Doubleday, 2005) is his newest work. The Nine Nations of North America (1981) 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. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1991) points out that people 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. The New York Times called Edge City groundbreaking.

Contact Jay Kappraff, kappraff@adm.njit.edu or 973-596-3490, for more information about the series.