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The Age of Spiritual Machines description How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. He calls this the "Law of Time and Chaos," and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously. This means that we'd better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible--they'll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, but also likely demand civil rights, and might at last realize the very human dream of immortality. The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible, and not necessarily best read from front to back--it's less heavily historical if you jump around (Kurzweil encourages this). Much of the content of the book lays the groundwork to justify Kurzweil's timeline, providing an engaging primer on the philosophical and technological ideas behind the study of consciousness. Instead of being a gee-whiz futurist manifesto, Spiritual Machines reads like a history of the future, without too much science fiction dystopianism. Instead, Kurzweil shows us the logical outgrowths of current trends, with all their attendant possibilities. This is the book we'll turn to when our computers first say "hello." --Therese Littleton |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Formative and messy |
| It's a very chaotic collection of thoughts that didn't provide any true insight to me. Compared to "The Singularity Is Near" anyway. (Or maybe it was excactly because I had read it before). The essential subjects, like exponential trends, virtual reality and chaos, get thrown around a lot, but that's it really.
In retrospect was definitely written in a very formative stage of Kurzweil's thought. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Ray Kurzweil fanboy, but we have better things available now in 2007. I'd recommend skipping it and going straight for The Singularity Is Near. Or, to some other newer book for that matter if you're reading this from the even more distant future, where these subjects finally get the serious attention that they deserve... The best part I thought was the chapter called 2009. By 2009 there would finally be wearable computers. We'd also mainly do the hardcore work with lighter than ~1 pound portable computers that come in various shapes and sizes. We'd have "body lans" of about ten different computers around our bodies at all times. Majority of text is created with speech recognition. Mostly no keyboards. Displays with the quality of paper. Instead of speakers, some small devices that can create "audible three frequency sounds from the spectrum created by the interaction of very high frequency tones". Learning has been efficiently computerized. Translating telephone technique with live speech translation. Disabilities are levelable with technology. Computer-collaborated art and music. Awesome electronic music controllers. (We have, what, the Wiimote?) Grammar checkers are actually useful. Cancer mostly eliminated. And most of all, THERE IS INTEREST IN THIS KIND OF PHILOSOPHY. |
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