Customer Reviews

Age of Spiritual Machines Hb

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WOW, what a book, what a magnificent book. There are very few people in the same league as Ray Kurzweil. You don't read a book like this looking for Shakespeare's ways with a word. You read it for the ideas, the unique, fabulous thought provoking ideas that the author presents. I have read several of his other works, and have also noticed that if you want, you can jump around a lot with Kurzweil's works, and you are not hurt by it.

The author W. Somerset Maughm (Of Human Bondage) use to walk into bookstores, purchase a book or books, and rip out the first 30 pages. When he would go on holiday as the Europeans say, which was constant, he would read the 30 pages of each work. If he liked what he was reading, he would return to pick up the rest of the book and finish it at his leisure. If he didn't, he would never pick up the rest of the book.

I mention this because the ideas that Kurzweil is presenting are so COMPELLING, that they reach out and grab you. Every page has something new and important that you need to know if you are into Futurology, and who isn't. The book basically lays out a chronological timetable of the future of computers, artificial intelligence and when you really come right down to it, MACHINE INTELLIGENCE.

Kurzweil believes that eventually machine intelligence will overtake human intelligence, and he lays it out step-by-step, and decade-by-decade. He also gives the reader an overview of the growth of computer power via Moore's Law since the inception. I am reminded of the 1950's when then President Eisenhower was taken to see a computer in action. The primitive device by our standards was huge, occupying an entire wing of a building. They told the President, you could ask it any question, and it would give you an answer.

Eisenhower asked, "Is there a God?" The thousands of vacuum tubes whizzed away with their shining lights, noises could be heard, and the computer replied, "Now there is." In a sense this is what Kurzweil is telling us is in our future. Maybe it was funny for the President, not so funny for us.

One of the reasons that computers will be able to do this is the ever-increasing capacity to continue to miniaturize the chips that will allow this to happen. At the moment human beings still win out, and one of the reasons is that the neurons in our brains are so tightly condensed together. Our brain is perhaps Nature's most remarkable achievement to date.

When we move towards computers, which employ nanotechnology we might reach the point where the circuitry for want of a better word will be more tightly compacted in computers, than the neurons that we humans have to settle for. There is also the possibility and Kurzweil feels it's coming, that cells derived from nanotechnology will be infused with our own cells to give us a BOOST if you will. We will wind up MERGING TOGETHER. Next time I run into Kurzweil at a conference, I have to find out if sex gets a boost too.

We also have to deal with the fact that 80% of our brain is devoted to maintenance (keeping our hearts going, running digestive functions, etc.), while less than 20% is allocated towards intelligence (thinking). As the machines advance in power, a 100% of their capacity or close to a 100% may be devoted to intelligence.

I think this book is nothing short of fabulous. It doesn't mean that Kurzweil is totally accurate, or even completely hitting the mark all the time. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that he is making us THINK. He is challenging convention, and the norm, and that all by itself makes the book worthwhile.

If one wanted to attempt to poke holes into the main thrust of his thoughts, you merely have to read Douglas Hofstadter's works. You might remember his Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Braid. Hofstadter is an expert himself in Artificial Intelligence. He has written, and Kurzweil quotes Hofstadter as well in one of his books, "it could be simply an accident of fate that our brains are too weak to understand themselves."

There is a bigger issue as to how complete an understanding we as human beings have of ourselves, and our brains. After all, the double helix discovery is only 50 years ago. We might be at the same stage of understanding the human mind, as physicists were in 1900 trying to understand the atom before relativity, and quantum theory.

Scientists cannot explain the breakout of culture somewhere around 12,000 years ago, after five million years of evolutionary biology had taken place leading to us. It is now believed that perhaps there was a gene mutation at that point in time, which lead to language, and thus the ability to communicate to one another. In 12,000 years, we've come a long way.

If in fact our understanding of our own complexity is at the absolute base of the pyramid, and we have thousands of years to go, maybe we can't even begin to model ourselves effectively via machine intelligence. In any event if you take the time to read the work of this magnificent thinker, you are granting yourself the rare privilege to have your thinking challenged, and your mind expanded. In the end that's a very good thing, isn't it?

Richard Stoyeck

I couldn't believe what I was reading when I started in on this book. I thought this guy was crazy until I began investigating who he was and saw an interview with Glenn Beck. Once I began seeing some of the things in his book (written nearly 10 years ago),coming to fruition, I was hooked. I've been watching his blogs all the time.