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The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Paperback – January 1, 2000
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- Print length388 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2000
- Grade level12 and up
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions9.24 x 6.02 x 0.89 inches
- ISBN-109780140282023
- ISBN-13978-0140282023
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible, and not necessarily best read from front to back--it's less heavily historical if you jump around (Kurzweil encourages this). Much of the content of the book lays the groundwork to justify Kurzweil's timeline, providing an engaging primer on the philosophical and technological ideas behind the study of consciousness. Instead of being a gee-whiz futurist manifesto, Spiritual Machines reads like a history of the future, without too much science fiction dystopianism. Instead, Kurzweil shows us the logical outgrowths of current trends, with all their attendant possibilities. This is the book we'll turn to when our computers first say "hello." --Therese Littleton
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-- The New York Times Book Review
From the Back Cover
Imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between humanity and technology fades, and where the soul and the silicon chip unite. This is not science fiction. This is the twenty-first century according to Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era. In his inspired hands, life in the new millennium no longer seems daunting. Instead, it promises to be an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live.
More than just a list of predictions, Kurzweil's prophetic blueprint for the future guides us through the inexorable advances that will result in: computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Eventually, the distinction between humans and computers will have become sufficiently blurred that when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them.
About the Author
Visit Ray Kurzweil on the web:
http://www.kurzweiltech.com
http://www.kurzweilai.net/
Product details
- ASIN : 0140282025
- Publisher : Penguin Books; First Thus edition (January 1, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 388 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780140282023
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140282023
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Grade level : 12 and up
- Item Weight : 15.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 9.24 x 6.02 x 0.89 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #147,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #34 in Human-Computer Interaction (Books)
- #120 in Social Aspects of Technology
- #239 in Artificial Intelligence & Semantics
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." PBS selected him as one of the "sixteen revolutionaries who made America."
Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, 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.
Among Ray’s many honors, he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012). He is Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
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As far as hardware is concerned, the author insists that Moore's law, according to which computing power at a given cost doubles every 18 months, will continue unabated. Current computer technology will hit fundamental physical constrains in about 10 years, but the author insists that intelligence will find a way to grow explosively without slowing down because of mere physics. He describes several potential avenues through which computer power can increase. The most intriguing one is the possibility of building quantum computers. According to theory these can have immense computing power, because quantum phenomena allow for a huge number of calculations to be done in parallel. Nature does never give something for nothing, and, for my taste, quantum computers come too close to the edge - but who knows?
More interesting is the question of software. When I was a student I was taught that hardware power is not very significant for defining the reach of computers, because algorithmic complexity almost always grows exponentially when related to the size of the problem to be solved. So fundamental advances will come from better algorithms, not from increased hardware power. The current state of affairs seems to agree with this view. After all, word processing 20 years ago using an Apple II is not fundamentally different from word processing today using computers a thousand times more powerful. Algorithmic design is a very costly process that few humans can do well, and this fact, it seems, would necessarily frustrate the rapid increase in machine intelligence. The author produces two solutions: One, to dissect a human brain and copy its "algorithm". To me this sounds rather similar to Da Vinci's idea of dissecting birds in order to build a flying machine. The second solution refers to methods where the algorithm builds itself, i.e. learns how to work. Two methodologies are mentioned here, genetic algorithms and neural nets. Many examples are given about the successful use of these to solve surprisingly difficult problems. These are powerful ideas. Certainly if we come to a point where an intelligent machine can design and maybe build an even more intelligent machine, then indeed we have the ingredients for a runaway explosion of intelligence.
The author paints a rather scary near future. First we use machines to broaden our own minds, but we also build independent machines that become more and more powerful. The war between conscious machines and humans never happens, because it is won by the machines before it even starts: Human minds migrate into machines and lead a fruitful life within the more expansive means that this new medium offers. A few biological humans remain at a much lower level of intelligence, and presumably wilt away without remorse or bitterness. The next level of evolution is achieved by beings that are unimaginably more intelligent than we are now. At this stage it is not meaningful to talk about machines, they are just our offspring living in bodies that are not DNA based. In fact these immortal beings include persons originally born as humans, including, it is stated, Microsoft's Bill Gates. Again, all of this will happen in the next 100 years.
Now, what is wrong in this picture, apart from the idea of having Bill Gates around for all eternity?
For starters, for this vision to work the whole world should be like California, which it is not. On most places of this planet misery rather than intelligence rules. The book was written before the techno-bubble burst, an event not predicted in the book, and also before the recent power failures in California itself. The earth is in such bad working order that one must wonder if ever intelligence will take hold.
Also, if the explosion of intelligence is a necessary natural phenomenon, something like an unstoppable supernova, then by now the universe should be full of manifestations of intelligence, it should be infused, drenched, saturated by intelligence. Why, entire suns would be cloaked in order to harvest their energy needed for the huge amount of computations going on. (Maybe this explains the mystery of the dark matter, i.e. the fact that most matter in the universe is not visible.) Also, why hasn't this cosmic intelligent fabric reached us? Well, maybe they wanted to leave part of the universe in its natural state, you know like we keep protected nature parks. Our corner of the universe may be just such a place. We do not listen to the noise created by intelligence elsewhere, but maybe this only shows our low level of development.
Now, if we assume that the universe is not really intelligent, this leaves us with three possibilities: First, for some reason there may exist intrinsic limits to the growth of intelligence. This does not seem probable, particularly after reading this book. Second, depressingly, the explosive growth of intelligence may always bring about its demise, the same way that the uncontrolled growth of cancer kills the organism that creates it. This sounds rather plausible if we observe the way humanity manages the world today. The third possibility is that the growth of intelligence reaches a level where it decides to stop, where it understands that the "law of accelerating returns" is not conducive to happiness. So maybe the universe is filled not only by intelligent, but also by wise races, that look after their own small garden without disturbing the rest of creation, and live meaningful, biological, limited lives.
All in all, this is an extremely interesting book to read. I withhold one star, only because I find that the catchy title has little relevance to its content.
The author attempts to justify his predictions starting in the first part of the book. In chapter one, called "The Law of Time and Chaos", the author attempts to show that time is changing its "speed". The examples he gives are not really convincing from a scientific point of view, and he does not give any recommendations for any empirical tests of his assertions. And even though his arguments are plausible, one could deny them and still believe in the predictions he makes later in the book.
His view of artificial intelligence is in terms of neural networks and genetic algorithms, with the former being around for some time now, and the later making its presence known rapidly. There is no doubt, and the author addresses this many times, that any type of machine intelligence will have to be able to mimic the creativity of the human mind and its ability to make unexpected connections with concepts that can appear at first glance to be completely unrelated. The author gives though convincing arguments as to the ability of even current computers to perform acts of creativity and automatic knowledge acquisition and discrimination, such as in the arts.
The author discusses many strategies for building this new form of intelligence, including optical technology, nanotubes, and DNA computing. The later however will probably not be the way to go, as astronomical quantities are needed to perform some of the feats of calculation, such as the traveling salesman problem, which is mentioned by the author in the book as one that can be tackled using DNA computing.
Quantum computing however is also mentioned in the book, and this approach holds much promise, and will be extremely powerful if realized. Current strategies in quantum computing are usually based on the experimentally unjustified notion of entanglement, but it looks hopeful that other ones will be developed that will bring out this quantum coup de etat in programming power.
The social ramifications of the new age of intelligent machines is not ignored however in the book. He predicts, with ample justification I think, a growing "Luddite" challenge to the explosion of technology. Thankfully though, the author remains optimistic, and predicts events and technologies that would make today's computer scientists drool with anticipation.
All of this is going to happen according to the author, within the next 30 years, and he gives a dramatic overview of the hypothetical decades ahead. Those readers basking in the current optimism, which can with confidence be called a technological Enlightment, will read these pages with great excitement and a longing to be part of what is ahead. Sure, the book is only a prediction, but lets keep our fingers crossed.........
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という点について、博識・博学で知られる著者の考えを披露して欲しかった。また知性だけでなく、もっと根源的な「命(いのち)」という視点からも、機械と人間の比較に踏み込んで欲しかった。しかし、それは過大な期待として差し引くとして、本書は当該分野における秀逸の書物と思う。














