Summa Technologiae

Why it’s on the list: Lem’s 1964 treatise on where technology leads. It anticipated virtual reality (“phantomatics”), nanotechnology (“molectronics”) and the need to hand cognition over to superhuman machines once civilization hits an “information barrier.” It went almost unread in English until Joanna Zylinska’s full translation in 2013.

Where I saw it: It is the subject of Lee Billings’s Nautilus essay The Book No One Read (2014), which reads it against a 2007 Singularity Summit whose attendees had mostly never heard of it.

Connections

• The Book No One Read — Billings’s essay on the book.
• Singularity — Lem as an earlier, more rigorous forecaster of the same idea.
• Artificial Intelligence — the book’s case for automating cognition.