will3's Full Review: Ray Kurzweil - The Age of Spiritual Machines: When...
Ray Kurzweil is described as the ‘ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes magazine on the back of his book, ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’. Ray, (and we’ll call him Ray) has invented and innovated several remarkable devices, such as the Kurzweil reading machine, which reads books for the blind using OCR technology and the voice recognition technology that appears on Windows 98. He is also something of a digerati prophet, having predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion around 1998, the World Wide Web, speech recognition and many other technological innovations.
The premise of this book is to provide a technological and almost science fictional prophecy of where technology is leading us within the next 100 years. The basis of Ray’s hypothesis is that computer technology is soon to supersede human biotechnology by around 2025, allowing us to upload our brains to nanotechnological robots and thus fulfill a deeper level of evolution.
The first part of the book begins from the big bang, and with a bit of new physics, traditional philosophy and evolutionary theory as understood by Ray. Then we move through a historical understanding of computer technology, with Ray explaining that computers will soon be faster than human brains as determined by Moore’s law. We are then led into an investigation of intelligence and the ‘minds’ of machines. The next series of chapters explores such topics as virtual reality, nanotechnology, robots and the ‘creativity’ of machines.
Ray then proceeds to explain his qualifications, and provides his predictions of how human life will interrelate with technology in 2009, 2029 and 2099. This part of the book actually consists of half of the book.
Overall, I was very disappointed with this work. I was expecting a bright, fresh and open-ended appraisal of technological possibilities and their relationship to human ‘spirituality’. Rather, I experienced a sense of fixed, routined, superficial and 'inhuman' assumptive premises, which do not explore the existential and human consequences to a very satisfactory degree. I feel the use of word ‘Spiritual’ in the title of this work is misleading, as there is very little spoken of the spiritual dimensions of machines or even human beings.
Much of the book consists of these very droll conversations between Ray and a woman named ‘Molly’.
MOLLY SPEAKS LIKE THIS AS THE DEVILS ADVOCATE, ASKING THESE VERY DOWN HOME KITCHEN SINK QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT TURNS HER PANTIES IN A KNOT EMOTIONALLY ABOUT MACHINES REPLACING HER DOING THE DISHES.
And then, Ray, very coolly, in a very ‘human’ carefully casual voice reels of all his benchmarks and supposedly empowering questions, addressing Molly’s concerns and verbally selling her the idea of prostitute robots like some ultra confident snake oil door to door salesman.
These parts of the book I found to be quite wet, and dare I say, pathetic stabbings around in the dark of what he believes to be within the subconscious of his readers. Ray does address the subconscious stabbings around in the dark, yet the reader finally only feels consoled and ultimately unenlightened.
I generally find Ray to be a writer who initially appears to be convincing, and yet if you carefully read his words one will find many assumptions of a certain closed system of certainty, inevitably leading to his carefully constructed scenarios of ‘mechanical life’. His descriptions of these new forms of life sound hollow, despite the clever words, somewhat ignorant even – especially regarding his understanding of the nature of human consciousness. One cannot help think, if we have only just beginning to understand human consciousness and the brain, how can we be so arrogant as to think our self-replicating machines won’t simply replicate our limitations?
(and to such questions Ray always has a rather smug and self-satisfied position of ease which he hopes relaxes one into his trajectory of thought)
The purpose and meaning of such machines is not truly investigated within this work. Rather, the readers feels caught within a didactic miasma of various positions of thought, of which Ray is a rather detached and objective commentator. At times it is as if Ray is only surveying our technology, calculating it will be faster and therefore more capable than us, and concludes the consequent machines must be the next evolutionary possibility – bestowing them with capacities which serve what end?
Evolution?
Which incidentally, according to Ray, is an inferior means of intelligence replication.
I find the idea that our creations are to overcome us, to be an ultimate form of arrogance, a misconstrued form of transcendence – heavily implying the utilization of technology to finally obliviate our mannequins of sin, repressed guilt and shame. Certainly, the first 1500 years of this age involved the programming of such Christian conceptions of our own unworthiness, guilt in the face of the nature of god – the absolute reality of which everyday people took for granted.
Yet, Ray’s work, as much as it is dotted with very intriguing, often mystical quotes and interesting ideas about what life can be – ultimately betrays the nature of the present nature of human consciousness and the basis of OUR bio-technology. What Ray has not perceived is that perhaps our biotechnology is the uncharted region of beingness: of which his imagination is incidentally arising from. That visioning and inspiration, I understand has touched many people. There is an album by the band ‘Our Lady Peace’ called ‘Spiritual Machines’ with Ray making spoken word appearances. This album is a very plaintiff cry of the human organism, with lines such as ‘like a machine, I'll fix you from the start’, ultimately telling of a man calling woman to the actuality of being, indicated as a more spiritual form of bio-technology.
As much as Ray understands neural nets and nanotechnology, his direct understanding of the human psyche and consciousness leaves us staring into this stark void of mechanical meaninglessness, something like cheap pornography in its immediacy of gratification. There is something very tacky and shallow about his conceptions of what it is to BE...with or without machines.
One supposed this is the ultimate dream of materialism, to become completely material – and then to shape the material in a ‘superior’ way and remove all the icky, messy parts of existence which hold us back from sheer mechanical functionality and efficiency.
Not that I completely discount the scenarios outlined within this work, they certainly appear to be possibilities that we may indeed fulfill in the future if we desire it to be so. Although I do believe that humanity will completely choose its own bio-technology, its own present meaningful awareness as the basis for a real connected life of which we will discover, and is prophesied within most every religious tradition.
This life has arisen from an overall organic living process occurring over millions of years of unfolding deliberations. The evolutionary capacities of the human organism must be inherently contain more truth, beauty and love than secondhand creations of originally inanimate life, because they are spiritual, because they are connected and arisen of a primary cosmic computer of vast and ineffable intelligence – which most religions to date have labeled God.
A decade ago, Ray Kurzweil, the MIT Inventor of the Year in 1988, correctly predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web and also predicted that a co...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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