Kurzweil - The Age of Spiritual Machines

Ray Kurzweil - The Age of Spiritual Machines

URL: Amazon

Why: I think this was an x-mas present from my cousin (x-mas ‘03) - but i only just had time to read it.

Thoughts: What did this book do for me?

I’m not entirely sure what i thought about this book. It felt like quite an ego boost for not only the author but his products. It’s interesting to read the book in retrospect, as his predictions in 1999 seem to be way off, even 5 years later - example: direct retinal displays, that were meant to go commercial in 1999.. where was I when this happened?

The book stinks of transhumanism, not that i’m against it - just sometimes scared of it. A close friend of mine once told me that for millenia people had to rely on themselves for survival, they couldn’t just go down to the “quick-e-mart” and purchase food, they had to scavange or hunt for survival, and even though i was aware of this situation - and of it’s current incarnation in certain environments, i’d never really thought about it. He finished in saying that to these people the wilderness was home - it wasn’t considered the “Wilderness”, it was just their environment, so when people now-days go out *bush*, so to speak, they are entering an environment that used to be completely comfortable to the majority of the population.

So what if we’ve practically reduced the principle of “only the strong survive”, is that so bad? So what if we’re overpopulating the planet, at least we’re giving more people a chance to make *some* sort of difference to the world - good on us. My old economics teacher once told me that a great sign of a civilisation was how they treat their elderly - and i think with our ever-extending lifetimes and research and resilience to current problems our civilisation is starting to look fairly great. (well, at least from my bias)

Do i think that in 100 years there will be no distinction between the human mind and artificially created personalities? Some parts of me are hoping yes, but other parts just dismiss this as fantasy. Kurzweil would like to think so, and also claims to have correctly predicted many of the things that we take for granted - i just don’t know.

As a comp-sci student, i must admit that most of this text felt fairly dry - and ended on a pretty disappointing note - the three paradigms for creating an intelligent machine? I mean come-on - i don’t think it’s as simple as creating a machine that combines evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural-nets and recursive algorithms - there is still some mystery left.

Oh - and end-text footnotes *shudder*.

Posted by Christian 23 September 2004

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