Customer Reviews

Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

Reading some of the other customer reviews on here kind of bums me out. It seems like people are judging this book based on their own expectations rather than for what it is: an entertaining tour of the most important ideas about artificial intelligence.

I loved this book. But I realize that I am a quirky guy who happens to be fascinated by theoretical science, and who is already fairly well-read about the singularity concept. For me, the book was an entertaining opinion-piece in which Dooling takes the reader on a tour of singularity's main ideas, while making sure to keep the reader entertained the whole way. He touches all the bases from Moore's Law to basic programming concepts (and hits on most of my favorite topics including consciousness, free will, and memes), and he gives the reader a glimpse at the contributions and opinions of all the key personalities from Ray Kurzweil to Bill Joy. Rather than being in depth and technical, the book presents the ideas in an everyman style, and Dooling provides enough specific links and references to point anyone interested in learning more about specific technical topics in the right direction.

In my opinion, Dooling also makes some noteworthy contributions in the form of opinions and hypothetical scenarios. I've spent considerable time reading about artificial intelligence, and Dooling came up with quite a few interesting twists to the usual analysis that were new to me! As long as you have sufficient background knowledge, you will be able to tell when Dooling gets into opinion/speculation mode, and you should take it as such. For example, I personally disagree with his idea that singularity might be just another form of religion, but I am glad to have been exposed to the interesting idea. Bottom line: it is a book of ideas and hypotheticals, not a book about technical information. And I think it's filled with some superb ideas!

I bought this book in hopes that it would offer a detailed, analytical discussion of the origins, present state, and possible futures of machine intelligence. In that regard, I'm disappointed. I suppose the subtitle would more aptly read, "Based on Hunter S. Thompson's narrative style, but with the gonzoness". The book dwells more, as other reviewers have noted, on vaguely relevant citations of jargon, quotes taken out of context, snarky comments on hacker and gamer culture, and insubstantial, plebeian drive-by sniping at Microsoft. Sure, the discussion of the parallels between Faust and the scientists of the Manhattan Project is fairly interesting, but I believe this is old hat for most geeks. The 25-page anecdote describing the conspiracy of a father and son to circumvent the wife/mother's effort to get the boy involved in sports instead of the playing World of Warcraft was entertaining, but took up 23 pages more than it needed to. There is definitely no engineering insight into machine intelligence, unless you're able to find something that I missed in the author's retrospective of the early days of word processing and the supposition that Microsoft is trying to screw us all to death with their license enforcement and lack of file-format portability. Several other folks have mentioned the tongue-in-cheek code snippets that the author included; I think he'd actually have been ahead to include, instead, a sprinkling of illustrations from XKCD.

Prior to reading this book, I'd read the wikipedia article discussing the Technological Singularity. It offered a much more concise and technically insightful discussion of this material. I wish I'd saved my money and time, and stopped there, and spent my time reading in-flight magazines instead of trying to get value from this book.

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.

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?

The concepts and perspectives on artificial intelligence presented in this book are compelling. It's not a question of if, but when we reach the singularity, and the types of issues humanity will have to deal with. When I read this book, I see a bright new world of computers helping to solve the world's currently intractable problems.

My only complaint is the organization and structure of the book. The upside is that it's loaded with thought provoking material, and you can start reading at any random point in the book and get something out of it. But at the same time, I find myself confused when trying to tie it all together coherently. My approach is to just read every page as a new essay that's at best loosely connected to early parts of the book.

Richard Dooling discusses the growing power of artificial intelligence and the possibility of the "singularity", the point at which artificial intelligence could become self-aware.

Dooling is very amusing, tossing out some great one-liners, and bringing together a wide range of knowledge from the fields of technology, science, and philosophy. He discusses Turing tests, the classic test for "true" artificial intelligence, and expounds on the implications of Moore's Law (that computer processing power doubles every two years).

He talks about current dependence on technology and about a future when man and machine become inseparable and indistinguishable, and about the possibility that humans are well on the way toward inventing the species that will supplant us as the dominant life-form on Earth.

This is serious stuff, and it's pretty fascinating, and all told with lots of humorous anecdotes and bits of trivia. If only Dooling could have stuck to the topic.

Instead, he goes off on tangents based on what appears to be his personal gripes with Microsoft, World of Warcraft, and Richard Dawkins, each of which gets roughly a chapter of general ranting in of the sort you can find in a million blogs and message boards. And none of which have much at all to do with the topic at hand.

I was also disappointed in Dooling's playing up of gender stereotypes, particularly with his attempt at humor regarding World of Warcraft. Dooling loses some his credibility by appearing to have missed the news that there are female gamers. Most of us figured that out about ten years ago. Some of us married one.

The Microsoft stuff was another disappointment. Not that Dooling is fundamentally wrong in his issues with Microsoft. It's just that the same complaints have been bandied around the internet for years, and they have little bearing on the book that Dooling seemed to set out to write.

In fact, the whole second half of the book feels like the author ran out of ideas and was simply grasping and ranting on whatever he felt like.

Which is too bad, because it was all off to a really good start. This is still a very funny book, and a very interesting one. I was entertained. Dooling tells some good stories. If he could have told them in a more coherent way, he might have really had something here.

The author provides a balanced view of the "singularity" and gives Ray Kurzweil his due. The suggestion that humans learn programming languages to make us somewhat more acceptable to our AI successors is a bit of a stretch, as if we were dogs learning tricks to keep our owners feeding us. Of course, learning programming is a good idea but for pete's sake -- if computers are a threat, don't we need to put in safeguards? But I'm not trashing the book; it is a fun read and the author is obviously well educated in both the classics and in current scifi literature. He suggests that religion, in one form or another, will be with us always. I read it on the Kindle and took a few notes along the way. Good read.

Bill Yarberry, Houston, Texas

Richard Dooling admits to drinking whiskey, at the end of this book, and whiskey was perhaps the co-author. This book is a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor, with a few wild (scary, yet entertaining) conjectures, but it often misquotes and misrepresents science and engineering. God, but he loves Unix! God, but he loves code boxes (where was the editor for this book?)

Read it. It is about things that we (or more likely our progeny) will eventually have to face. However, the author clearly misunderstands Moore's Law and other critically important scientific and engineering details. He has no idea what the word "singularity" really means in hard science. He has but a feeble grasp on science and engineering, but that did not stop him from making extreme extrapolations.

If you really care about God and His/Her supposed antithesis (Science), don't read this book as it will either annoy you or confuse you. It will not enlighten you. Dooling has no idea about Einstein's religious beliefs, but has cherry-picked a few popular anecdotes. Here is a counter anecdotal quote "cherry" from the top of the tree: Albert Einstein wrote: "From a Jesuit Viewpoint, I am an Atheist. I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist." - Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism; quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic, Vol. 5, No. 2.

Invoking/speculating about what Albert Einstein really believed about God is not a trivial pursuit, as he was one of the most complex human beings to have ever graced our presence. Mr. Dooling is not qualified to go there.

Mr. Dooling has produced a work of pure fiction with some Dave Barry style humor and some fractured references to the realities of science and engineering. Read it as such.

Or, read the Idiot's guide to Unix.

Full disclosure: While not a friend, or even acquaintance, of the author, (we met once at a book-signing many years ago) he and I have occasionally e-mailed for years. Richard Dooling is a smart, funny, and engaging writer who never fails to entertain. (And while on the topic of full disclosure, we both were graduated from high school in 1972 but he has accomplished way more than I have; I am quite envious!) White Man's Grave remains a novel on my list of all-time favorites. Blue Streak was a brilliant and biting look at how confused we are about language and propriety. I was eagerly looking forward to this book. But I did not quite find what I was seeking.

Part of the problem is just how confusing and vague all this is. There are web sites galore dedicated to showing how silly predictions from the past now look. "If current trends continue..." is the beginning of many silly and foolish sentences. One of the things most astonishing to me is that a person from the 50s could return to my life and with a few minor adjustments, do just fine. We live in single family houses spaced in about the same way he did. We drive cars to the office, just as he did. We work in an office quite similar to his. We wear clothes he would recognize (though not as appropriate work attire!) and his wardrobe, while possibly looking quaint, would not really stand out. Nor would his haircut, language, or music. Sure, there are computers behind everything, including doorknobs, watches, and toasters, but the basic premises are still the same. The phone has no cord, and can be used anywhere, but if you told him, "Here's how you dial this...and you need 9 numbers now" I think it wouldn't be a problem. Our music comes from a box with platters that go in, rather than on, it or one that has buttons instead of dials. The TV has more choices, but works about the same. You get the idea. Our baseball stadiums, movie theaters, restaurants, traffic lights, grocery stores, and high schools would be far more familiar to Mr. 1959 than his would have been to a transplanted Mr. 1909. Things aren't all that different in many ways. Yet no one in 1959 would have imagined that here in 2009, 8 years AFTER 2001, life would look so similar. Predicting the future is hard!

Another problem is, as touched upon by another reviewer, the lack of a clear definition of what intelligence is. And how it differs from consciousness. A newborn baby, with virtually no knowledge and who-knows-how-much-intelligence, has consciousness, which, I think we'd agree, distinguishes him from a machine. The baby cannot pass the Turing test. Yet he has something the machine does not, and can not, have. A two year old can easily tell the difference between a glass apple and a real one on sight. So, who's more intelligent, the toddler, or a computer, which would have a very hard time distinguishing? Just what does intelligent mean? I don't think I'd ever want a computer to go to the grocery store for me to buy fruit. No matter how "intelligent" it is.

And, it does meander a bit toward the end, where his love and admiration for Open Source options (shared by me) goes on too long. The diatribe against the evil empire, which does stifle and limit and restrict and slow the development of computers however it can, other than where necessary to sell more and more bloated and sluggish Vistas, just isn't integrated as well as it could have been. See paragraph two above...AT&T, GM, US Steel and other huge 1950's corporations are tottering or dead. Microsoft could be in the same boat soon and join Burroughs and Honeywell and DEC in a museum of once massively important concerns.

It is still a fascinating, worthwhile, and informative read. I learned a lot about what some people think the future holds. And I was scared and tickled by what they imagine. The speculations were intriguing, the excerpts well chosen. The Unabomber stuff was riveting. And Rapture for the Geeks was often laugh out loud funny; its EULA worth the price of admission alone. Just a little slight for the momentous topic he has tackled.