The Age of Spiritual Machines
by Ray Kurzweil
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ray KurzweilEdition: Audio Cassette
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Format: Audiobook
Published: 1999-01-01
ISBN: 0140868887
Number of pages: 2
Publisher: Penguin Audio
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Book Reviews of The Age of Spiritual Machines
Book Review: Should be called The Age of Thinking Machines
Summary: 4 Stars
Ray Kurzweil has written a great book, but the title is very misleading. Mr. Kurzweil, as far as I can tell, is very much a humanistic/mechanistic person, not believing much in the spiritual as defined by traditional orthodox religion. Nevertheless, this book on the rise of artificial intelligence (what I would call the age of thinking machines) and our likely symbiotic relationship with them in the near future, is very thought-provoking, and makes for compelling reading.
The author makes a very good case that humans will inevitably merge with computers and machines to form a type of human-machine hybrid that is still human, but "enhanced" with neural implants to think faster and better, and replacement body parts (either biological or mechanical) that will allow us by the year 2040 to live easily to 120 or 150 years of age. After that, it gets even stranger, as humans will probably choose to abandon their bodies to be "down-loaded" into cyborg-android artificial bodies, or just live as pure thought without a physical presence in virtual reality. (A non-physical being could control nano-foglet particles to form a physical presence if required.) Brave new world indeed.
I have no idea if any of Kurzweil's predictions will come true, but he has a good track record. I highly recommend reading this book, then follow it up with the sequel titled "The Singularity Is Near" (an even better book than this one, although both are terrific).
Summary of The Age of Spiritual Machines
The national bestseller by the "ultimate thinking machine" (Forbes) whose predictions for the future are startling, provocative--and closer to fruition than you think.Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century--an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweil's prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably 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); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.
"The Age of Spiritual Machines will blow your mind. . . . Kurzweil lays out a scenario that might seem like science fiction if it weren't coming from a proven entrepreneur."-- San Francisco Chronicle
The Age of Spiritual Machines appeared on national bestseller lists, including the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle
Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, won the Association of American Publishers Award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990
How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. He calls this the "Law of Time and Chaos," and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously. This means that we'd better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible--they'll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, but also likely demand civil rights, and might at last realize the very human dream of immortality.
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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