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

Download File Size:5.72 MB

---