Customer Reviews

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

5 star:		(75)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I don't feel like writing a review so I'll keep it short and sweet. It's a very interesting read and makes you look at things from an angle you might normally not.

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

Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines is an enthralling look at the future of computers and technology. While much of the book is speculative, Kurzweil both entertains and educates as he explains his claims about the future. A thought-provoking read for anyone interested in computers & technology.

...the ideas in this book are highly stimulating and fascinating. It is basically a summary of all the wants of futurism--nanotechnology, AIs, quantum computers, holistic evolution. But instead of finding these theories spread over numerous books, Kurzweil brings them all together as emanating from one conclusion: evolution is increasing on its own order, and thus speeding up. Our technology is a part of the evolutionary process, and should not be feared.

How realistic are these visions? Foglets (nanotech clouds that can form and reshape into any object), scanning our brains into robots or computers so we can be immortal, quantum computers...Nanotech has some fundamental problems to work through, A.) how to dispose of heat and B.) that funky thing called quantum mechanics. The brain is ludicrously complex (neurons have thousands of connections), and the notion of simply scanning it into a computer and having one's memories recreated inside a new robotic shell is a bit far fetched. Neuroscience is still a hazy business, see The Undiscovered Mind and The Mind and the Brain (from different Points of View, the former Freudian, the latter a proponent of Free Will). If our memories are no longer existent in the new shell, at least the memories as we remember them (I know this is getting into "loaded question" territory), does the self remain the same? Is it the same "person", a man of meat becomes a man of machine who remembers his "old" past differently?

Nonetheless, this is a worthwhile book on where humanity may be going to, and it would probably help give you some ideas if you're a wannabe science fiction writer. You can also drop some of these concepts on your date and wow her w/ your insight and speculatory nature.

One complaint that I have about the book is I didn't care for all the quasi-conversations the author manufactures in the beginning of the latter chapters. I started skipping them.

His reasoning feels more like religious zeal, I just can't buy into his vision of the unbounded potential of intelligent software.

This book changed my life. Highly recommended.

I am not sure there is anything I could say that someone else reviewing this book has not already said. My experience was hit & miss, reading the book in short spurts over a month or so a few months back. His expectations and theories of where computing is headed are intriguing, and you can easily correlate what has already happened and what has been announced to his theories. The title was published in 1999, but yet even with how fast computing has changed Kurzwell's thoughts flow along with the advances that have happened since 1999. Who knows what will happen, and the author could be a bit optimistic in his thoughts - but I think that is just a humans well wishes for our kind showing in his writing.

The suggested readings & web links will have you reading & researching for a long time to come.

I would venture to recommend this title to anyone who is interested or works with computing. Having a grasp on where we have been , and where we are (most likely) heading towards.

This is an OK book. It is another in a long line of books that teases out of some present trend a future that seems wondrous, somewhat frightening, and somehow plausible. Mr. Kurzweil's thesis is that the next step of evolution will be that our own machines will attain consciousness through their sheer capacity and the powerful software we will write. At some point they will become more intelligent than humans and so forth.

I think two things he includes in the book point to the problem (even though the author really thinks he has convincingly dealt with them). First, on page 72 he includes a wonderful cartoon with two scientists working on a complicated formula on the blackboard. The words "Then a Great Miracle Occurs" are written in the middle of the formula. One of the scientists, pointing to these words says, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two". The weakness of this book is similar. There are lots of specific claims, but nothing much provable.

The timeline 261-280 is also in the tradition of these kinds of books. Lots of detail and specifics from the past up until the publication date of this book (which was 1999). Then we skip TEN YEARS to 2009 - a date near enough to give the book a plausible relevance, but far enough in the future that the book won't be disproved until long after it has become irrelevant. Oh, well...

As I said, there are interesting things here to read and think about, but in many ways this is really a work of science fantasy rather than a serious analysis of the future of society and technology.

Bring along a sense of humor when you read this interesting work. The author argues that given the steady and seemingly endless (well, at least, for the last thirty years) march of progress in computational information processing, in next to no time we will have encountered the next Great Leap Forward in the evolution of life, transfer ourselves into electronic neural nets, and just sit in our hammocks drinking virtual Mai-Tais while we download ourselves into immortality (so we can, perhaps, be the servants of the next generation of silicon-based life forms).
Kurzweil is at his best when he makes us think and at his worst when he is trying to be realistic about it. Just because it would seem that when you have an infinite number of computers with an infinite number of megabytes they will eventually produce conscious life (or something that says it's life), doesn't make it so. Nearly every conjecture in this book is highly speculative and nearly as realistic as devising a machine that will predict something as simple as, say, the stock market or how to find a decent internet date. Of course, he gives himself an "out" by saying that humanity may find some clever way to destroy itself, but a better bet may be that something in his well-oiled "spiritual machine" will go awry and leave us wondering when the Next Great Leap Forward may take place.
Interesting reading but the past is littered with the remains of predictions that seemed just about as plausible but now just seem very, very amusing.
On the other hand, Kurzweil's short book is worth reading because of the author's excellent credentials and because it is such a good thought piece. Technology often seems to be increasing at a seemingly unworkable rate, and this often-expensive "designer technology" may become directed by the financially rich but ethically deprived, or the legally and politically powerful. The people in a well-educated democracy should be thinking about how to ethically and consistently handle the social and psychological changes and benefits associated with these developments, and this book seems a good place to begin.

I found Kurzweil's view of the future to be rather flat and unimaginative. What will we do when we have a computer that can do a million more computations than the average human brain? According to Kurzweil, we will use it to emulate a million human brains. Why bother? All Kurzweil seems to be able to imagine this awesome amount of computing power being used for is virtual sex and a cheap shot at immortality.

But is it really immortality? Only if you consider having a copy of yourself as having immortality. In truth, the real you, the carbon based you will eventually die anyhow.

Like most transhumanist thinkers, Kurzweil's view of the future is little more than a thinly veiled religious philosophy where technological innovation is god. Kurzweil spends much of the early part of the book emphazing how inexorable and unstoppable technological evolution is and connecting it to what passes in Transhumanist religion for the moment of Creation: the Big Bang.

It never seems to dawn on Kurzweil that there is something ironic in only engaging in virtual sex with a "lover" whose appearance you are able to freely modify at will. In what sense is this love rather than mere masturbation?

Kurzweil believes with unquestioning religious fervor that if the human brain is capable of abstract thought, then being human is completely reducible to abstract thought. He believes this so implicitly and yet so firmly that he never even bothers to really think about whether this might not be the case.

In the end, I feel the book is much like an infomercial. If you are interested in buying what Kurzweil is selling, you'll probably like it. If not, then it is merely a way to kill a few hours.