SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE

The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is best known to English speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh Throughout his writings comprising dozens of science fiction novels and short stories Lem offered deeply philosophical and bitingly satirical reflections on the limitations of both science and humanity In Summa Technologiae his major work of nonfiction first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past present and future forms After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance Indeed many of Lem s conjectures about future technologies have now come true from artificial intelligence bionics and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload the concept underlying Internet search engines and the idea of virtual reality More important for its continued relevance however is Lem s rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity Preceding Richard D