Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist and screenwriter Dooling (White Man's Grave) contemplates the Era of Singularity, the coming day when computers will be able to outthink humans, in this uneven take on the future of machine intelligence. Dooling is at his best when he profiles technology's most captivating futurists: Ray Kurzweil, inventor of scanning and text-to-speech technologies, beguiles with his vision of human minds embedded in silicon chips; physicist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge portrays a bleaker future where humanity serves its hyperintelligent computer overlords. Dooling veers back and forth between celebrating the speed with which technology is evolving and ruing its hidden perils (our fatal flaw... is Promethean fire-stealing, the instinct to always and everywhere overreach), along the way touching upon the computer research, various philosophies of mind and intelligence, and the historical tensions between man and machine. While an engaging writer, Dooling tends to indulge in sarcasm and snarky humor, which trivializes the deeper import of his message: that whether machines ever become self-aware, living minds, we are losing something of what makes us human when we lose control of our own creations and their meaning. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Praise for Richard Dooling:
Rapture for the Geeks
“Surprisingly engrossing, quick-witted.”
—New York Observer

“One doesn’t expect a nonfiction book to be fascinating, chilling, thoughtful, and funny in equal measure. This one is. My question: When computers become smarter than humans, and especially if they take over, will they regard Rick Dooling as dangerous, prescient, sympathetic . . . or irrelevant?”
—Kurt Andersen

Bet Your Life
“Manages to invoke Double Indemnity, the Old Testament, and Fountains of Wayne with equal vehemence and thriller wit. . . . If you’re not hooked, you’re one dead mackerel.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Fascinating . . . A socially relevant satire [that’s] midway between John Grisham and Carl Hiaasen.”
—The New Yorker

Brainstorm
“Brainstorm is simply brilliant—hilarious, thought-provoking, and masterfully crafted. The characters are fantastic and irresistible but completely believable, and their banter is so witty and natural that a reader can forget they are debating ideas at the cutting edge of brain science and philosophy.”
—Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works

“Exuberant . . . deeply pleasurable . . . Here is a whodunit that achieves a comic fugue-state mastery of the language of our sexually charged, violent, technocratic society.”
—Colin Harrison, New York Times Book Review

Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech and Sexual Harassment
“A charmingly impudent essay on language and sexual politics . . . an extremely clever and creative sort of literary acting out.”
—Richard Bernstein, New York Times

White Man’s Grave
“A bravura display of satire . . . Dooling ... --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harmony (September 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307405257
• ISBN-13: 978-0307405258
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #588,119 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Start, Poor Finish, November 14, 2008

By	James B "James B" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

While this book started out well, it dropped off quickly from there. Very readable, fairly humorous, but not very techinical it began with a good introduction to the future of technology and AI, but devolved from there into a series of largely irrelevant essays on computer programming. The author, a lawyer, not an engineer, becomes overly fascinated with his own knowledge and repeatedly just threw in snippets of code or tech jargon, apparently for no other purpose than to impress us with his knowledge. Also most annoying were his completely pointless rants about Microsoft. Now I have nothing particular against Microsoft bashing, but it didn't have anything to do with the subject of the book. I can get that for free on the Internet on any Linux forum out there, so why should I have to pay $15 for the honor?

In all a decent intro to the subject though, at least I know what books I want to read now.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Rupture of the Geek, February 5, 2009

By	W. Richman "consumer culture dropout" (on the couch, covered with cats, reading a book) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are some interesting/funny bits in the book, but as another reviewer pointed out, Dooling seems to become so enamored with his own breadth of knowledge that he just _has_ to share it with you. All of it. After running it through a blender. The most interesting parts are the quotes he uses from knowledgeable people in the various fields, but his attempts to interpret what he thinks they're trying to say don't often make a lot of sense. I appreciate his position on the "open source software" movement, and I share his loathing for all things Microsoft, but I'm not sure what either of these things has to do with artificial intelligence. Then, in chapter "12.5" he goes off on a rambling rant concerning why Richard Dawkins isn't in a position to say that "god" doesn't exist. He apparently has some kind of ax to grind on the subject, because he pretty well beats it to death. I'm not sure I'm even going to finish reading the book at this point. Overall, it's neither particularly funny nor particularly insightful. It's as though he wrote the whole thing while admiring himself in the mirror. Not pretty.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book, and I know nothing about its subject..., April 4, 2009

By	William E. Adams (Midland, Texas USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Except that at age 64, with less than ten years experience on a home PC, doing the simplest of operations (including, some would say, 756 or so simple-minded reviews on Amazon) I am smart enough to still be afraid of computers and all the related digital technologies they pioneered. Mr. Dooling comes across in this non-fiction contribution as a guy I would definitely love to share some whiskey with. In an ideal world, the whiskey would be expensive, and would be his, and we would speak of anything but the subject of this book. (I've read two of his novels, although for some reason I did not review them here.) According to Dooling, we face a future in which "machines" are rapidly becoming so much "smarter" than humans, that our enslavement is more likely than not. (Some elites may survive to do for the machines the few tasks they might not be able to accomplish for themselves, but I won't be one of those. I face a rather quick execution if the world Dooling describes does come to pass while I still live.) How much tongue is in his cheek over the course of this humorous, scary look at the near-future? I can't say, because I have no background. It is a tribute to the man, however, that I finished this one understanding so much more than I expected to comprehend. He likes and quotes Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet, and that always disposes me kindly toward an author. He likes and quotes Albert Einstein, who lived only ten miles from me during my first ten years of life. (My father used to drive down Mercer Street in Princeton NJ on a regular basis, and reported Einstein sightings to the rest of the family.) Here is one from Albert that I had never come across before: "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." Since the great scientist died in 1955, he was not speaking of the same exact matters that concern Dooling now, but you get the point, and if you plan to read this book, you likely disagree with it. There are many laugh-out-loud moments here, but a bunch of them are of the black humor mode. The book offers a lot of serious food for thought as well. I think the scariest passage is on page 137, quoting a programming guru, Bill Joy: "I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil...whose possibility spreads well-beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals." In other words, wait 20 years and the next "Unabomber" can, via technology, do bio-terrorism to whole cities rather than send "package explosives" to one office. Yikes. Follow up that nightmare with the quote 11 pages onward, attributed to one Edward Heller: "Man: A creature that, upon the irrefutable evidence of his history, cannot control himself" (could someday be) "in control of all life on earth" (via super-computers.)Yikes again.

I don't think Richard Dooling hates technology at all, at all, as the Irish say, but he sees not just the bright side of the 21st Century, and it is of course, the dark side that we must anticipate. The book isn't perfect. From page 216 to 235 it is mostly about God, religion, atheists and what the super-computers of the future will think about those subjects and do about them. He has serious moments here, and parody sections, and perhaps goes on too long in this vein, although in my opinion, he comes out on the right side of things. All in all, I thank my friend Jim Clark of Kansas for sending this one to me, but I believe it is very worth reading, even for technophobes like me, and even if I had paid for it. Can there be higher praise for a writer than that?