The Age of Spiritual Machines

I ordered the hardcover version of this book and received "Deep Time" by Gregory Benford instead. Never even heard of it. I am trying to return this incorrect order but getting: "There are no eligible item(s) to return from order." What the heck?

This is a good read for those trying to understand why some believe in the transhumanist movement. Kurzweil lays out his predictions for the future till the year 2099, where he predicts humanity will become a "digital species". This book was written in 1999 so its a bit old but its intresting to see he has been right in many of his predictions. Overall, if your looking to understand more behind the belief of trans/posthumanism, this is s good buy, as Ray Kurzweil is one of its most notable advocates.

I couldn't believe what I was reading when I started in on this book. I thought this guy was crazy until I began investigating who he was and saw an interview with Glenn Beck. Once I began seeing some of the things in his book (written nearly 10 years ago),coming to fruition, I was hooked. I've been watching his blogs all the time.

Of all the books written in recent years concerning the soon-to-be-felt effects of rapidly advancing technology, Ray Kurzweil's is the best. He combines a confident grasp of technical and scientific complexities with the unusual ability to express far-reaching ideas in a way that is not only understandable but compelling. Kurzweil is a noted inventor, a wealthy entrepreneur, a genius, and a fine author. It's too bad he hasn't published more books (this is only his third), but apparently he has his hands full running high-tech companies, participating in think tanks, and contributing to his fabulous online chronicle of technological advancement. The Age of Spiritual Machines serves as a sweeping review of the historical development of intelligence and computation, as a grand introduction to the fields of nanotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, and as a mind-blowing summary of where we are headed in the next thirty years. Kurzweil's scientific credentials are impeccable and lend credence to his often startling extrapolations. For the non-technical reader, the book is very engaging and highly readable. For the more serious student, it includes a comprehensive series of notes and an exhaustive bibliography. On all counts, I give it my highest recommendation.

I bought the book after attending a symposium organised by DougHofstadter at Stanford and featuring Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec(among others.) It really is a best seller in the US - at least intech book terms - WAKE UP Britian! The central theme of this book (and Moravec's Mind Children and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind and Paul & Cox's Beyond Humanity), is that we are approaching the crossover ie we are roughly 20 years away from when machine intelligence will overtake human intelligence. And that once this happens, machine intelligence will accelerate into uncharted waters. I think that a convincing case is built that we are on track to do this within approximately this time span. It's quite possible to nit-pick over much of what Kurzweil says - but that's not the point. The point is the general vision of where we are headed. Kurzweil's view is that there is a 50% plus chance that humanity will make it through this transitory phase (ie the next century), that we will successfully combat the comming threats of self replicating biotech pathogens, software pathogens and self replicating nanopathogens, to complete the process of integration with our technology - and abandonment of our biological roots that we are now in the early/final stages of. Early because we are currently only fractionally fused with our technology (language, books, machines etc). Final because the maybe 40,000 year process is, because of the exponential acceleration of technological development, perhaps only 50-100 years or so away from completion. I guess this is likely to seem utterly far fetched to 99.9% of the public - just as would mobile phones, the internet and robotic jet travel have seemed beyond belief to a 1900 audience. My belief is that these guys are very much on the right track. Bottom line - If you are interested in how this century might pan out, this is as good a place to start as any. END

This book brings together the theory of evolution, philosophy, biology, chemistry and the exponential growth of technology to explain how the world became to be what it is today, and where it will continue to go. Kurzweil puts together very strong arguments for his theories and predictions and leaves me a believer. I think that every computer science major (and anyone interested in the future) should read this book.

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.