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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.… (more)
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This book is like a techno-optimist's response to the Unabomber's manifesto. My problem is that the future espoused by Kurzweil is only slightly more appealing than the Unabomber's.
Specifically, I don't care for his timeline/predictions that humanity will be associating primarily with machines
That seems like an inhuman future.
His idea of refinements and how much humanity will accept them also seems overly ambitious.
I would point to video games as an example of the refinements that a computer can "get closer to reality"... Every year, EA Sports's claim that "It's in the Game" gets a bit more appropriate.
But I think we're a long way away from people paying $35.00 to have tickets to see folks play a video game.
If that's a function of the time it takes humanity to accept computers or inherent limitations in computers, I'm not sure... Either way, his predictions seem off-base.
The beginning, however, stimulates the mind to the point that you don't want to think about it. What makes us us? This
Ray Kurzweil explains it in a easy, not alarming and optimistic way.
After reading The Age of Spiritual Machines and his later book the Singularity is near I can not understand how
I also was turned off by his dialogues at the end of each major section. I can only suppose he thought he was being cute or was trying to reach a different audience with that Socratic device, but it was just annoying to me. His predictions for 2009 were somewhat close, but are going to start failing big time come 2019 and beyond. His Law of Accelerating Returns might have some bearing on technological increases, but he's pipe-dreaming when it comes to socio-political matters.
And one last gripe...on quotes: When I see quotes in a book, I often like check on them to see if they are accurate, if there is anything interesting to go with the quote, or even if the quote is correctly attributed. Kurzweil peppers his books (all two of them I've read so far) with so many that pulling those threads would take too much time, and for the most part, they're fun. He blew it when he "quoted" Bill Gates...Gates never said "640,000 bytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody." Perhaps such a gaffe could be forgiven except that in one of his dialogues from the 2029 future prediction section, he said to his ... counterpoint? ... "at least there are fewer references to look up."
Should have looked up one more.