Rating: 
Summary: Interesting if facile
Review: An interesting, if somethings facile, look a the blurring lines between human and computer intelligence. The research is good, and the writing style clear, making it a good primer on the subject, with lots of though-provoking meat on the bones of the argument.A computer wouldn't have made the grammatical mistakes the author does. Ironic, eh?
Rating: 
Summary: This is the future of advanced society
Review: Technology will win, and this is why. Take the trends of two trains, proceeding along the track in opposite directions at very high speed. Once the situation is properly described anyone can envision the result. The track, the velocity, and the players are all very well discribed by Kurzweil in this work.
Rating:
Summary: Renewed my interest in reading
Review: I was a fiction reader in high school and junior high, but when I turned about 18 I stopped reading for some reason. When I was 20 I bought the Our Lady Peace CD by the same name as this book and got interested in why a band would name their album after a book. I read this book twice in a row. A few parts are kind of heavy reading, but read it again and soak up the ideas because it is worth the study. Get online and look at the websites he promotes, download the digital artist screensaver. Play with the basics of what are coming. I know that this book scares quite a few people and I don't know whether or not some of the world changing things will really happen in the next century, but I do believe it is eventual. The only thing scary to me is that the future doesn't scare me. Thank you Ray Kurzweil for renewing my interest in reading.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!!!
Review: I've started this book really suspicious: "Is Ray Kurzweil going to be one of those 'Visionaries' who predict we'll have nanotechnology in two years, flying cars in three years, and immortality in four years?". While reading this book I both realized that Ray Kurzweil really is a 'visionary', however, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
In "The age of spiritual machines" Kurzweil surveys many technologies which he believes might turn out to be major technologies of the future: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Virtual Reality, Nanotechnology, and more. He tries to estimate where are we, the human species headed to, and backs all of this with very current scientific research. The second half of the book is like a series of interviews with a "person" of the future, each done in intervals of 10 years (2009, 2019, 2029 and 2099). Each depicts a certain future, at least the way Kurzweil imagines it would be. Like other reviewers have written, I believe Kurzweil is way, way, too optimistic in his time estimates. However, I do believe many of his predictions are basically right, and the way he threaded all of these various technologies into one believable future (actually, four) is truly astounding. This book was very engaging, written in a clear language. And considering the various technologies and sciences that are mentioned, this is quite an accomplishment.
I don't say this often, but I do believe this book will stay with me long after I have finished it, the possibilities and futures described are inspiring and stimulating. While Mr. Kurzweil might have been wrong in a few details, and certainly in his time estimates, I believe the gist of things yet to come is in this book. VERY highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: High stupidity and cult beliefs
Review: It's another book about the future of cyber technology and the/our evolution of/into intelligent/spiritual machines. Intellegent/spiritual machines! Alarm bells should ring that this is another flakey quack text from the A.I. community. They're all the same, they avoid or distort the issues around mind and consciousness to try to fit things they really logically can't into their belief system (i.e., the materialist paradigm). Complexity, emergence etc. are the catchy phrases that are claimed to do the job but they don't. When it comes to mind-like qualities, no amount of non-mind-like relations will do, what's needed is a qualitative/type change not a quantitative/token one. Being wed dogmatically to a mechanistic/materialist belief system and a highly resticted and biased form of empiricism, A.I. and many of the sciences often degenerate into this form of irrationalism when faced against their achilles heel ... consciousness or anything nonlocal since this also goes against the only form of causation they are allowed by belief to accept. This book is again just the same old spoiled milk but packaged in another bottle/book cover. I've got a better suggestion that actually "thinks outside the box", doesn't "think" like a box, and really looks at the problems that Kurzweil's implies are basically solved. Enjoy Christian de Quincey's, "Radical Nature", a much more profound work.
Rating: 
Summary: A truly thought provoking insight into our own destiny!
Review: The subject starts off with a brief history lesson about the processes of computer evolution. Quickly Kurzweil moves on to thought provoking, almost to the point of disturbing possibilities about our future interactions with machines. As he continues to extend us further and further the realization hits that we may someday find our species becoming the intelligent and spiritual machines that he predicts earlier in the book I found this book to be a methodically staged argument about the possibilities of living long enough to witness a transformation from the biological to the mechanical. Not particularly easy to follow start to finish and some parts way over the top but well worth the trip.
Rating:
Summary: Intellectual entertainment, of sorts
Review: This is actually a somewhat stimulating and entertaining look into a possible (probable?) near-future. At the rate that computer and computation technologies have improved over the last few decades, and the last few years in particular, it is no wonder that some techies posit that computers will soon surpass human intelligence in some areas. And given the drastic increase in what I've heard referred to as American Anti-intellectualism in recent decades, this may occur sooner rather than later. The book's jargon may be a bit much for the non-techie reader, but with careful and steady plodding one should be able to get one's head around most of the concepts. And if the content of the book proves to be too much to digest or comprehend, find comfort and amusement in the fact that the cover of the book is REAL SHINY!!
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Summary: Prophetic or just sensational?
Review: Technology is evolving at an exponential rate, and Kurzweil argues that this process has been in effect since the beginning of technology, and that it will continue infinitely. Technology is seen as an extension of human evolution, since it is one of the defining traits of human beings and is - so far - controlled by humans. The next step is for technology to began evolving without human interference, so that it will continue to devlelop independent of us; also, it will be more and more closely integrated into our lives, to the extent that humans and machines will be increasingly difficult to separate. That's all well and good, and Kurzweil provides plenty of technical evidence to his credit, and even refers to some of his older predictions that have come true. Central to his theories is Moore's Law, which states roughly that microprocessors double in speed every two years. Apparently, according to Kurzweil, this will eventually result in computers that are truly intelligent. Processor speed will eventually be superior to human brain processing, allowing machines to somehow jump from thoughtless super-calculators to living, thinking, emotional beings. Does this sound familiar? It seems like sci-fi has been anticipating this supposed inevitability for fifty years or more. But Kurzweil takes a slightly different view on things; namely, he seems to welcome such a change. Since technology is a natural extension of humanity, it fits right in with his pseudo-religious/scientific version of the super-human. The format of the book shifts between his predictions and theories to a fictional conversation with a futuristic woman. This woman is part human/part machine, and is capable of doing a number of activities simultaneously (Great for her resume, I'm sure): hold a conversation with the author, compose a symphony, write a book, make love; essentially, she does all the things that we do, but way better and way faster and all at the same time! Wow! Wouldn't that make life great! You wouln't even have to study music composition to write scores superior to Beethoven, because you could just download all the information you'll ever need. (Anyone who has ever used Sonic Foundry's Acid software, or Rebirth, knows that this anti-intellectual mode of music composition is already off to an auspicious beginning.) Kurzweil's book makes for an interesting read, and is particularly suited for the restroom or the coffee table, but his philosophy is ultimately anti-human. Certainly elements of his predictions will come true, but if humans ever cease to be mortal, limited by their own intellect, or antagonized by anxiety, they will no longer be human.
Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: brilliant if a little complicated in some parts...
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous but flawed
Review: Kurzweil is a polymath inventor/writer who, among other achievements, created the best musical synthesizers. Some see his clever book SPIRITUAL MACHINES as a benchmark for computing's future, except that he seems to have overlooked three critical aspects: the 'S' curve in science and engineering, the necessarily sensitive interactions between many human faculties and the single most important effect: human nature.
The 'S' curve? Yes. It starts with rapid development that soon tapers off. Plot progress on the vertical (x) axis and time no the horizontal ('Y') and the result is a squashed 'S,' whence the name. At the top of the S technique becomes more and more refined and ever smaller incremental improvements cost disproportionate amounts. Technology may become uneconomic.
Part of the problem, which Kurzweil does not address, is the way we actually live and process in the real (not 'virtual') world. Actual human behavior, behaviorists explain, moves quite slowly, because we survived and therefore the old days were good. We are appalling resistant to change, as Machiavelli noted. Kurzweil's binary-digital-number-crunching model errs in another significant respect: the body's emotional responses. Consider only chemicals, which exist in such rarefied arenas at such long-shot improbabilities that no projected digital machine, however sophisticated, can hope to match in the forseeable future. As Lyall Watson explains in "Jacobson's Organ" (read it!), about an unusual 'extra sense' odor-detection capability in man and animals, the European common eel can detect a few molecules of alcohol in concentrations as low as 10 to the -18, which he equates to detecting a single shot of vodka in Lake Erie. Kurzweil's machines will have a problem handling these tasks across the full range of human capability, likely giving rise to schizophrenic robots as well as sane ones.
Still, this is a wonderful read and The Amazing Kurzweil has a mind and heart that deserve our continued attention and respect.
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