Occasional insights, but painfully dated. ( )

This one was a little flat for me, and not just because of the title. I can't fathom why he would equate "spiritual" and "intelligence" - of course, both are evolutionary products, but they are not synonymous in any way. Whenever humans build conscious machines, I really hope that those machines won't have the electronic equivalent of the human gene that makes them susceptible to superstition/belief. Still, the book was engaging enough until Kurzweil started talking about the "elegance of Buddhist notions of consciousness". After that, I just looked for the meat and not his forays into computer poetry.

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. ( )

The author Ray Kurzweil has a fairly interesting premise - what happens when machines are able to duplicate the complexities of the human brain? He spends a lot of time trying to convince his readers of that eventuality but it's also apparent that he has drunk his own kool-aid. And he spends hardly any time on the most interesting question of his book - what makes us human?

And since his book was written in 1999, already some of his predictions are off the mark.

I skimmed the last few chapters as interest waned..... ( )

It had me thinking about this subject for a long while after reading the book. ( )

This was really unreadable. It's like techno-babble junk food. Never tries to back up its claims or present a logical argument. I found the question/answer format of some of the sections distracting and prone to digression. ( )

Since I get into contact with the Vinge's singularity concept I developed a very great attraction for the matter.
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 somebody can live without knowing about this potential threat and at the same time potential solution to mankind problems.

Very cool! I had no idea how advanced computers were becoming. The stuff they anticipate being able to do in the next 10-20 years is incredible! So glad I read this! ( )

Moore’s law, stating roughly that computer performance doubles every eighteen months, is well-known in the field of digital artifacts. Kurzweil draws on many years of experience in artifical intelligence to extrapolate a scenario of a near future where computers reach and exceed human levels of intelligence. At that stage, important questions arise concerning consciousness, responsibility, and the boundaries between humans and machines. Whether or not Kurzweil’s predictions are accepted, the general issues are worth pondering.

Once you read this book you will never look at the future the same way again. It changes everything about the way you probably imagine the next hundred years will go. ( )

Some good material in this book, but eventually rather repetitive, and, in some later "dialogues," a tad silly. Interesting to be reading it in 2010 and seeing his 1999 predictions for 2009.

Further thinking along the lines of his first book on this theme. Some great points, although he gets into the soft porn a bit much for some readers. ( )

In the first half of the book, Kurzweil constructs a sturdy foundation for the material and puts forth a number of ideas I can agree with (e.g., his defense of Eric Drexler's views on molecular technology). Ultimately, however, he fails to address (or even acknolwedge) any of the major attacks on strong AI (something he tries, and fails, to make up for at the end of The Singularity is Near) and his own scant discussion of consciousness and intentionality are laughable at best. The latter half of the book is a heavy dose of blind Extropian optimism, replete with free-market fantasies. ( )

I gave this book 5 stars based on the beginning chapters, not the entire book. Towards the end, the book became repetitive and dragged on. It did not have to be so long.

The beginning, however, stimulates the mind to the point that you don't want to think about it. What makes us us? This philosophical question is not necessarily answered, but it puts a different spin on it. What is the line between human and machine, for both humans and machines? Really makes you think about what we are and what will come in the future. ( )

Ugh.

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 by 2019.

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. ( )

This book is an enjoyable treatise on how the world might evolve over the next century as computing power increases at an accelerating rate. It is perhaps a more technical and constructed version of the writings of a Bill Joy or even the UnaBomber. Kurzweil lays out some theories or 'laws' as he calls them, which are based on historical data, and mixes that data with some relativity theory and Moore's laws of computing. They are graspable but not so solid that they have become widely believed. Extrapolating from the laws, the books lays out a plausible future where computers become much smarter than people; and people increasingly rely on computers for their brain power. There were some issues in the book. First, I really disliked Kurzweil deciding to write a lot of the book in a pseudo Socratic Method interview with himself. Very off-putting, and this leads to my lower rating. Second, the theories or laws are not explained that well. All that said, the fellow is on to something big, and it's so easy to be a visionary without putting specific predictions down, he has to be acknowledged for going out there and making specific predictions even 100 years out. If you now mix this older book with the newer writing of Aubrey de Grey on aging and the progression of biology/medicine, etc., you get quite a picture of life in 2030 or so. ( )

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS….
1999… Publication of Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines.
2009… Computers are able to perform a trillion calculations per second… Most routine business transactions take place between a human and virtual personality… Translating telephones are commonly used for most language pairs... Bioengineered treatments for cancer and heart disease greatly reduce the mortality from these diseases... Human musicians jam with cybernetic musicians.
2019... Computers equal the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain... Interaction with computers is through gestures and two-way spoken communication... Most learning conducted through software-based teachers instead of paper books and documents... Automated driving systems installed in most roads... People have relationships with automated personalities.
2029... Computers have the computing capacity of 1,000 human brains... Majority of communication does not involve a human... There is no human employment in production, agriculture or transportation... Computers have read all available human- and machine-generated literature and are now learning on their own... Machines claim to be conscious.
2049... The common use of nanoproduced food means that the availability of food is no longer affected by limited resources and bad crop weather.
2072... Picoengineering (developing technology at the scale of picometers or trillionths of a meter) becomes practical.
2099... There is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers... Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence... The goal of education, and of intelligent beings, is discovering new knowledge to learn... Life expectancy is no longer a viable term in relation to intelligent beings.
... RAY KURZWEIL UNVEILS THE FUTURE WORLD IN WHICH WE WILL LIVE, WORK AND THINK.

virtual thinking ( )

A fun book, facts mixed with conjecture. Hopeful that the technological train we are riding does not stop. ( )

I learned a lot from this book; but it still creeped me out. I read it quite a few years ago; but I remember that it wasn't very technical. ( )

http://captnsaj.blogspot.com/2006/03/captains-book-review-singularity-is.html ( )