The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

reviewed by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

The title of this book is misleading -- this has nothing to do with touchy-feely pseudoscience or religion. Rather it is a convincing preview of the 21st century, based on predictable advances in technology. It's also a useful guide for writers and readers of science fiction. (It makes me better appreciate the vision of Neal Stephenson, especially Diamond Age, where nanomachines pervade the world.)

Most compelling is his description of likely advances over the next 20 years -- where working prototypes of the underlying technology already exist. In this realm, Kurzweil, the entrepreneurial inventor responsible for the Kurzweil Reading machine, the Kurzweil synthesizer, advanced speech recognition, etc., speaks with convincing authority.

Highlights:

"Emerging in late 1998 is the 'tactile mouse,' which operates like a conventional mouse but allows the user to feel the texture of surfaces, objects, even people." (p. 143)
"The intelligence of our present-day intelligent computers is narrow, which can provide effective solutions for the narrow deficits of most disabled persons. The restricted intelligence of the machine works effectively with the broad and flexible intelligence of the disabled person... With regard to the major physical and sensory disabilities, I believe that in a couple decades we will come to herald the effective end of handicaps. As amplifiers of human thought, computers have great potential to assist human expression and to expand creativity for all of us." (p. 178)

He sees computer intelligence matching human intelligence within 20 years, and then far surpassing it, with annual doubling of power. First comes virtual reality; then nanotechnology where the reality is "real." (This sounds like Star Trek's holodeck not with holograms but with physical objects and intelligent "people" assembled instantaneously by nanotechnology.)

By 2099, his predictions become sci-fi-like. People are "software" which can be instantiated in other kinds of bodies, including nanotech ones; with everyone having (by law) several backup copies of the "software" (memories and thinking patterns) that is their identity; where there is no reason for anyone to die (in the biological sense); where human and machine minds exist together on the same universal network.

Kurzweil tells his story in the broadest possible terms, beginning (like Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time) with the creation of the universe in the first second of the Big Bang, and presenting his underlying thesis in terms of the relationship of entropy and evolution, order and disorder. He formulates and clearly explains three basic laws of nature:

The law of time and chaos: "In a process, the time interval between salient events (i.e., events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands or contracts along with the amount of chaos."
The law of increasing chaos: "As chaos exponentially increases, time exponentially slows down (i.e., the time interval between salient events grows longer as time passes.)
The law of accelerating returns: "As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (i.e., the interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes.)

Kurzweil sees the advance of technology is the inevitable continuation of the evolutionary process. Moore's law about the frequency at which computer power has doubled over the last few decades is presented as a subset of a more far-reaching principle, which provides the basis for broad, fascinating, and credible 21st century predictions.

The future he paints has enormous risks as well as opportunities. Imagine "nanopathogens," the 21st century edition of today's computer viruses, and imagine the mischief that creative villains could wreak at a time when people (all people) "live" as software in computer networks. He also points out the possibility that in a world in which people are just software, a handful of minds/entities might decide that there was no need for ten billion such entities, and might decide to eliminate the masses, seeing them as an inefficient expenditure of resources. This sounds like great material for sci-fi. But should we as individuals worry about possibilities that are so far off in the future? Well, if we believe Kurzweil, people who are teenagers today, might well still be in their prime when mankind passes the technology/evolutionary threshold and ordinary people become virtually "immortal" -- with the opportunity to "live" well beyond the 21st century, if disaster (deliberate or accidental) does not intervene.

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Published by B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 320-161, West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com

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