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Title: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil, Ray Karzweil, Alan Sklar ISBN: 0-14-086888-7 Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks Pub. Date: 01 December, 1998 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 2 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.96 (152 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Forget about Star Trek
Comment: This is flat-out the most intelligent and provocative look I've seen describing the development and direction of artificial intelligence. Ray Kurzweil is a true believer in AI, and he makes a convincing case for the emergence of a superior intelligence. And he's talking this century, folks, maybe within the next four or five decades.
These are the key points of his thesis, as I see them:
Computational power is growing exponentially and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future. By 2020, the computational power of a $1,000 computer will be about equal to that of the human brain. After that, computers leave us in the dust.
Biological evolution is slow and has taken us about as far as it can. It's already being replaced by technological evolution, the enhancement (or replacement) of slow, biological processes by engineered processes (e.g. neural networks).
The mind is just a complex machine. Issues such as consciousness, free will and the soul can be endlessly debated, but fundamentally, we are just a complex machine, currently the most complex one on the planet. But that will change.
Our bodies, also a complex machine, can also be re-engineered or replaced. Great strides are being made to simulate or replace our senses.
Technological innovation proceeds inexorably during the next few decades, rapidly transforming our objects and ourselves. By the end of the century, there will be virtually no distinction between human and artificial intelligence.
This is a fascinating thesis, a real mind-blower. Forget about a Star Trek or Star Wars future; that's not where we're going. Well, maybe Star Trek. Consider the Borg with personality and a sense of humor.
Rating: 3
Summary: Overly optimistic but fun none-the-less
Comment: Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is a history of the future, particularly in regards to computers and technology. Filled with timelines for how the author guesses our technology will evolve over the next century, the book reads more like science fiction than science.
Mr. Kurzweil has proven himself to be a visionary over the years, but in this book I feel he is getting ahead of himself. While I would not be surprised in the least to see some of his predictions come true eventually, I feel that the pace that he envisions is far too optimistic. We will eventually create computers that are as intelligent (and then more so!) than ourselves. Yet this is not going to come about for many decades, not in just a couple, as Kurweil predicts. Unfortunately, the author's arguments rely heavily on extrapolation of exponential trends, which rarely, if ever, pan out. Moore's law will break down in about a decade, and it could be some time before a paradigm shift comes about to start a new burst of computational speed.
On the other hand, the book is a great primer into such things as neural nets, genetic programming, and other programming architectures that will be the foundation of our technology for some time to come. Kurzweil's vision may be ahead of its time, but that does not make it any less compelling - or scary.
A fun, fast book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A mindblowing "radar update" of what's to come.
Comment: This book is an exhilarating glimpse into the future of technology, with an emphasis on when and how it could ultimately affect us: "us" as vulnerable injury prone biology, us as students, us as workers, us as socialites, and perhaps most interestingly, us as mortals.
Hard science in plain terms, Kurzweil stitches in humor and optimism to keep the reading fun, but never sacrifices the basic ambition of this book; I believe that ambition is to share his well-founded exitement about the likilihood that "just around the corner" (owing to the laws of accelerating return) things are going to get real interesting, and really strange.
While I note that plenty of reviews take issue with the pace of change Kurzweil predicts, few dispute the likilihood technologies outlined in the book (Nanotechnological production, AI, man-made/machine-made alternatives to biology such as prosthetics that work as well or better than nature designed) will ever come about, or take issue with the myriad ways in which they will have a profound effect on our individual lives, society, and the world at large.
Kurzweil is an optimist, but not a blind one. He was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Many of his tech-prophecies have come true, and he has well earned respect in the scientific community.
Even if he's somewhat "off" on timing, or the exact embodiment these technologies will take, just throwing one of your neural legs over the sweeping impact these technologies could usher in makes this book more than a worthwhile read.
Christian Hunter
Santa Barbara, California
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Title: Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. by Jay W. Richards, George F. Gilder, Ray Kurzweil, Thomas Ray, John Searle, William Dembski, Michael Denton ISBN: 0963865439 Publisher: Discovery Institute Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind by Hans Moravec ISBN: 0195136306 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century by John Brockman ISBN: 0375713425 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 14 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Age of Intelligent Machines by Raymond Kurzweil ISBN: 0262610795 Publisher: The MIT Press Pub. Date: 30 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Helix Books) by George Dyson, George B. Dyson ISBN: 0738200301 Publisher: Perseus Books Group Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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