Rating: 
Summary: Forget about Star Trek
Review: This is flat-out the most intelligent and provocative look I've seen describing the development and direction of artificial intelligence. Ray Kurzweil is a true believer in AI, and he makes a convincing case for the emergence of a superior intelligence. And he's talking this century, folks, maybe within the next four or five decades.These are the key points of his thesis, as I see them: •Computational power is growing exponentially and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future. By 2020, the computational power of a $1,000 computer will be about equal to that of the human brain. After that, computers leave us in the dust.
•Biological evolution is slow and has taken us about as far as it can. It's already being replaced by technological evolution, the enhancement (or replacement) of slow, biological processes by engineered processes (e.g. neural networks).
•The mind is just a complex machine. Issues such as consciousness, free will and the soul can be endlessly debated, but fundamentally, we are just a complex machine, currently the most complex one on the planet. But that will change.
•Our bodies, also a complex machine, can also be re-engineered or replaced. Great strides are being made to simulate or replace our senses.
•Technological innovation proceeds inexorably during the next few decades, rapidly transforming our objects and ourselves. By the end of the century, there will be virtually no distinction between human and artificial intelligence. This is a fascinating thesis, a real mind-blower. Forget about a Star Trek or Star Wars future; that's not where we're going. Well, maybe Star Trek. Consider the Borg with personality and a sense of humor.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and unsettling - a "must-read"
Review: Reading this book was an eye-opening experience and I highly recommend it as a "must-read" for anyone planning to live into the 21st century. I consider myself relatively computer-literate and cognizant of current technological advances but this book surprised and delighted me with both the depth and the breadth of what it covers. Ray Kurzweil is clearly a gifted thinker and he does a remarkable job of synthesizing a vast spectrum of thought and discovery ranging from that of antiquity's most revered philosophers to that of our top researchers working on the cutting edge of today's technologies. I found the book to be very well-written, turning material that could easily have been numbingly dull, dry, and complex into a compelling and moving story. It's structured in ways that, I believe, would make it accessible, intriguing, and valuable to readers of varied educational backgrounds and interests. For those who want to know the details, the back matter is bountiful, with all the footnotes, references, charts, and formulas you might need to delve deeper into any of the subjects covered. The main text is clear, colorful, and logically laid out. He makes clever use of an ongoing "dialog" with a character from the future to address questions and ethical dilemmas that the book raises. And throughout, Mr. Kurzweil's sense of humor and compassion help keep it all in human perspective. This book is both fascinating and unsettling, causing me to react with some apprehension, disbelief, and denial. Kurzweil has done us a huge favor by pointing out that much of what we may have comfortably considered science fiction is quite likely to become every-day reality much sooner than we might have believed or desired. I especially hope that this book is read by our government, business, community, and moral leaders. We should heed this "heads up" and get busy examining and debating the ethical, legal, and cultural ramifications of what we clearly face within our lifetimes.
Rating: 
Summary: 5 star controversy, 2 star believability, 4 to compromise
Review: Bring along a sense of humor when you read this interesting work. The author argues that given the steady and seemingly endless (well, at least, for the last thirty years) march of progress in computational information processing, in next to no time we will have encountered the next Great Leap Forward in the evolution of life, transfer ourselves into electronic neural nets, and just sit in our hammocks drinking virtual Mai-Tais while we download ourselves into immortality (so we can, perhaps, be the servants of the next generation of silicon-based life forms).
Kurzweil is at his best when he makes us think and at his worst when he is trying to be realistic about it. Just because it would seem that when you have an infinite number of computers with an infinite number of megabytes they will eventually produce conscious life (or something that says it's life), doesn't make it so. Nearly every conjecture in this book is highly speculative and nearly as realistic as devising a machine that will predict something as simple as, say, the stock market or how to find a decent internet date. Of course, he gives himself an "out" by saying that humanity may find some clever way to destroy itself, but a better bet may be that something in his well-oiled "spiritual machine" will go awry and leave us wondering when the Next Great Leap Forward may take place.
Interesting reading but the past is littered with the remains of predictions that seemed just about as plausible but now just seem very, very amusing.
On the other hand, Kurzweil's short book is worth reading because of the author's excellent credentials and because it is such a good thought piece. Technology often seems to be increasing at a seemingly unworkable rate, and this often-expensive "designer technology" may become directed by the financially rich but ethically deprived, or the legally and politically powerful. The people in a well-educated democracy should be thinking about how to ethically and consistently handle the social and psychological changes and benefits associated with these developments, and this book seems a good place to begin.
Rating: 
Summary: Overly optimistic but fun none-the-less
Review: Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is a history of the future, particularly in regards to computers and technology. Filled with timelines for how the author guesses our technology will evolve over the next century, the book reads more like science fiction than science. Mr. Kurzweil has proven himself to be a visionary over the years, but in this book I feel he is getting ahead of himself. While I would not be surprised in the least to see some of his predictions come true eventually, I feel that the pace that he envisions is far too optimistic. We will eventually create computers that are as intelligent (and then more so!) than ourselves. Yet this is not going to come about for many decades, not in just a couple, as Kurweil predicts. Unfortunately, the author's arguments rely heavily on extrapolation of exponential trends, which rarely, if ever, pan out. Moore's law will break down in about a decade, and it could be some time before a paradigm shift comes about to start a new burst of computational speed. On the other hand, the book is a great primer into such things as neural nets, genetic programming, and other programming architectures that will be the foundation of our technology for some time to come. Kurzweil's vision may be ahead of its time, but that does not make it any less compelling - or scary. A fun, fast book.
Rating:
Summary: An incredible read; a profoundly hopeful book.
Review: Ray Kurzweil is well known for the myriad of inventions he has pioneered, from the original Kurzweil Synthesizer through a series of computerized appliances designed to make life easier for the handicapped. He is less well known for his previous book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines," and for his shockingly accurate past prognosticating on the future of technology (he missed calling the chess match victory of Deep Blue against Kasparov by one year...making the prediction a decade or more ago). Now Kurzweil is weighing in on what the astounding exponential advance of computer processing power is going to mean to the human race. In short, he goes way, *way* out on a limb, and flatly predicts that human minds and bodies will have largely combined and integrated with super-powerful computers within 100 years from today. Furthermore, he convincingly extrapolates present advances in computing power to predict that a $1,000 desktop PC in the year 2020 will have equal computing power to a human mind. Then 40 years after that, by 2060, a desktop computer will have the combined computing power of every human mind on earth. And that curve will continue increasing until individual computers within the next hundred years will have the computing power of billions of human minds. In the face of that, Kurzweil predicts, human beings will assimilate with the new super-intelligence of machines, in order to bypass biological evolution and supercharge not only our minds but also our bodies, which will be remade and redesigned in virtually any way we might find compelling and useful. In short, Kurzweil is predicting the emergence of a new species within the next 100 years, as machine intelligence exceeds carbon-based intelligence by millions of powers. Scary? Not at all. In fact, not only does Kurzweil make his predictions supremely believable but the picture painted by his predictions heralds a golden age of existence for humanity that far surpasses anything that has gone before in its beauty, complexity, speed, intelligence, longevity, creativity, and spirituality. Read this book, and fasten your seatbelt. If Kurzweil is right, most of those who live until about the year 2020 or 2030 will probably live long enough so that they will never have to die. Kurzweil's predictions are more than hopeful; they herald a real new world of wonder and beauty undreamed of even by science fictions writers until recently. And he's serious.
Rating:
Summary: Are we the Machine?
Review: I am not sure there is anything I could say that someone else reviewing this book has not already said. My experience was hit & miss, reading the book in short spurts over a month or so a few months back. His expectations and theories of where computing is headed are intriguing, and you can easily correlate what has already happened and what has been announced to his theories. The title was published in 1999, but yet even with how fast computing has changed Kurzwell's thoughts flow along with the advances that have happened since 1999. Who knows what will happen, and the author could be a bit optimistic in his thoughts - but I think that is just a humans well wishes for our kind showing in his writing. The suggested readings & web links will have you reading & researching for a long time to come. I would venture to recommend this title to anyone who is interested or works with computing. Having a grasp on where we have been , and where we are (most likely) heading towards.
Rating:
Summary: Another in a long line of futurist fantasy -cleverly written
Review: This is an OK book. It is another in a long line of books that teases out of some present trend a future that seems wondrous, somewhat frightening, and somehow plausible. Mr. Kurzweil's thesis is that the next step of evolution will be that our own machines will attain consciousness through their sheer capacity and the powerful software we will write. At some point they will become more intelligent than humans and so forth. I think two things he includes in the book point to the problem (even though the author really thinks he has convincingly dealt with them). First, on page 72 he includes a wonderful cartoon with two scientists working on a complicated formula on the blackboard. The words "Then a Great Miracle Occurs" are written in the middle of the formula. One of the scientists, pointing to these words says, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two". The weakness of this book is similar. There are lots of specific claims, but nothing much provable. The timeline 261-280 is also in the tradition of these kinds of books. Lots of detail and specifics from the past up until the publication date of this book (which was 1999). Then we skip TEN YEARS to 2009 - a date near enough to give the book a plausible relevance, but far enough in the future that the book won't be disproved until long after it has become irrelevant. Oh, well... As I said, there are interesting things here to read and think about, but in many ways this is really a work of science fantasy rather than a serious analysis of the future of society and technology.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: Fascinating stuff. Recommended for anyone interested in computer science or just want to read some entertaining literature.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, yet disappointing
Review: I found Kurzweil's view of the future to be rather flat and unimaginative. What will we do when we have a computer that can do a million more computations than the average human brain? According to Kurzweil, we will use it to emulate a million human brains. Why bother? All Kurzweil seems to be able to imagine this awesome amount of computing power being used for is virtual sex and a cheap shot at immortality. But is it really immortality? Only if you consider having a copy of yourself as having immortality. In truth, the real you, the carbon based you will eventually die anyhow. Like most transhumanist thinkers, Kurzweil's view of the future is little more than a thinly veiled religious philosophy where technological innovation is god. Kurzweil spends much of the early part of the book emphazing how inexorable and unstoppable technological evolution is and connecting it to what passes in Transhumanist religion for the moment of Creation: the Big Bang. It never seems to dawn on Kurzweil that there is something ironic in only engaging in virtual sex with a "lover" whose appearance you are able to freely modify at will. In what sense is this love rather than mere masturbation? Kurzweil believes with unquestioning religious fervor that if the human brain is capable of abstract thought, then being human is completely reducible to abstract thought. He believes this so implicitly and yet so firmly that he never even bothers to really think about whether this might not be the case. In the end, I feel the book is much like an infomercial. If you are interested in buying what Kurzweil is selling, you'll probably like it. If not, then it is merely a way to kill a few hours.
Rating:
Summary: The future may be more interesting than you think
Review: Kurzweil's book tries to predict what our lives would be like in the year 2100 (yes, one of his predictions is that we'll all still be "alive" in 2100 - for the reason I put "alive" in quotes, you'll have to read the book). A common theme you see in many science-fiction books and films that try to depict life on earth in 2100, or life of advanced aliens, is the striking similarity between the way of life of these creatures and our current lives. Star-Trek is a good example. Sure, Captain Kirk shoots a laser gun, gets teleported and eats food generated by a machine, but in his world humans (or other carbon-based life forms) still rule, travel physically in the universe, get cured by a human doctor, and so on. More unusual life forms are either relegated to one episode, or given bizarre flaws to explain their rarity (e.g., Commander Data). So, what will earth really look like in 97 years, in 2100? What will it look like in just 17 years, in 2020? Kurzweil sets out to predict the answers to these questions, and he does so in an enjoyable writing style and using his extensive technical knowledge and visionary approach. He will shock most readers by his predictions which initially seem outlandish, but on second thought suddenly sound very reasonable and very possible - and perhaps even - undeniable. The basic premise of this very interesting book is what Kurzweil calls "The Law of Accelerating Returns". Moore's law, stating (roughly) that the computing power of a $1000 computer doubles every 12 months, is an example of Kurzweil's more general law. But Moore law only talks about integrated circuits made from transistors - this law only became relevant in the 1960s, and will most likely stop being relevant sometime in the next decade. But Kurzweil demonstrates that the same "law" of computing acceleration has been valid ever since 1900 (!): The first computers were mechanical, then came computers using electro-mechanical relays, then came vacuum tubes, then stand-alone transistors and finally integrated circuits and VLSI; Computing continued to accelerate at an almost constant pace throughout all these changes in paradigms and technologies, and Kurzweil argues that it will continue to do so - even if we need to replace our IC-based computers by computers based on massively-parallel neural networks, nanotechnology-manufactured computers or even quantum computers. Once you understand Kurzweil's basic premise and agree that it is plausible (he explains it very well and very convincingly), the unavoidable consequences are staggering. The most obvious thing that is going to happen if computing accelerates in its current pace, is that around 2020, a $1000 computer will have the computing power of a human brain. Very quickly afterwards the computer "intelligence" will surpass those of humans. In the following decades other advances in technology like self-replicating nanotechnology will make relying on human labor and thinking not only unnecessary - it will even be stupid. Sending a human for exploration missions in outer space in a large UFO-like spaceship would be extraordinarily silly, when you could send a computer sized like a grain of rice and having the intelligence of a thousand humans. By 2100, computer intelligence and the original human intelligence that started it all will be completely inseparable, according to Kurzweil. I don't want to spoil your fun of reading the book, so I won't reveal here more of Kurzweil's predictions. Kurzweil's book isn't perfect, of course. It discusses philosophical and moral issues very sparingly. It downplays "modes of failure" (like computer viruses, renegade nonobots) and the effect of Luddites and underdeveloped countries. It is very conservative economically (Bill Gates will remain the richest person in 2050, in 2020 there will be many more lawyers than doctors, because Intellectual Property will be the most important economic issue). All-in-all Kurzweil's book is very thought-provoking and I strongly recommend it. Even if most of his predictions never come true, it really shines a light on the question of what might happen as computers get stronger and stronger, too strong to be used merely as a platform for "cute" GUIs like Mac OS/X or MS-Windows :)
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