I find the author has taken a cautionary tone with his review of Kaku's work, and while that may provide some small solace for those intimate with and concerned about those difficult problems that Frank points out -

Easy problems, according to Chalmers, were things like figuring out how the brain cycles through signals from the arm allowing you to pick up an object. Researchers developing the next generation of prosthetics will tell you this “easy” problem remains pretty hard, but as Chalmers rightly pointed out, control of the arm is nothing compared with developing a scientific account of the vividness of our own experience. It’s the internal luminosity — the “being” of our being — that constitutes Chalmers’s hard problem and that eludes Kaku’s engineering-­based perspective.

I am tempted to suggest that since we do not have a unified theory of everything any solution to scientific understanding of the being of our being remains beyond our grasp - but, as Frank overlooks -

Kaku believes the most important advances in silicon computing will still serve our needs and not the coming robot overlords (if we do create them).

I, for example, perceive an overwhelming need to address the issue of Global Warming in much the same manner as we approached lunar landing - yet wealthy interests stand in the way. Please, permit me . . .

to reverse-engineer each and every person’s brain.

and you will wake up to discover that each and every human being has become nothing more than a tool, entirely disposable, in the single minded effort to leverage these wealthy interests out of my way by whatever means possible.

I would raise up, one by one, those individuals who wholeheartedly and without reservation support those wealthy interests as symbols to the sum of their brethren, symbols of terror, and of abject despair . . .

People are not some pigment and while it may not exactly be new to treat them as if they were, it remains true that the potential that exists today, to divide self from self, remains not only unprecedented in human history, it brings into question the basic justification for our continued existence.