I had this book recomended to me (repeatedly) over the course of my reading of Radical Evolution. I was underimpressed by Ray's endless wanking at the idea of replacing human interaction with computer interaction, and the substition of the mortal coil with the superiortity of the T-800. If you are non-proficient with the subtlety of human mechinations, then the promise of escape via virtual reality, nano-orgasm machines, and techno-immortality can seem like the stuff of dreams. As a list of "bold predictions" this sketchbook of sci-fi cliches lacks the hard science to suggest the wildly optomistic timelines the author suggests.

As an artifact from the heady, euphoric days before the dot com burst, one can see how this book was published, and subsequently purchased by a great many people. By the time the author was defending previousely made statements about the actualization of his earlier predictions, I saw a pattern of half-truths that paints a techno-eutopia which here, in 2006, hardly exists in the labs of MIT, let alone for purchase as Best Buy, as the author so desperately hopes for.

This book summarizes a decade's worth of Popular Science articles (that decade being the 1990's) and the most enticing fantasies of the transhumanists, but is not actually fun to read. The dialogues with "Molly," the author's internal dialouge about the future of the toys he wishes will save him, borders on embarrassing.

There are a dozen books about exactly these subjects, which should be read first.

Ray Kurzweil is my best writer. I love his books. He writes in a clear way and he is really persuasive. This book is the best book I have read about the future of artificial intelligence. It teaches you so many interesting topics on computational neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. This book has been written in 1999 and some of its first predictions are about to become true in 2006. I believe in all of the Kurzweil's theories because I am writing and programming my undergraduate thesis on computational neuroscience. I am sure you will enjoy the book. It is worth the price!

I read SINGULARITY before SPIRITUAL which, of course, is exactly the wrong order. In the time since this book was published he has had an opportunity (in SINGULARITY) to reflect, confirm and gloat if you will. Unlike Drake, who promised we would receive confirmation of extraterrestrial life by the year 2000, Kurzweil is amazingly accurate. He forecast an extremely short discovery period for the Human Genome (confounding the "experts" who predicted 100s of years). He stated that Big Blue would defeat a human - this after a devestating defeat. He correctly predicted the exponential rate of computer power and all that this implies for our future.

When he says "spiritual" - a word I am uncomfortable with - he is not assigning theological or mystical characteristics. More accurately he is describing a "human" machine, a machine with its philosophical underpinnings as human but yet it is more than human. The Age of Human Machines would be a more apt title. The book is not straight forward (perhaps by design) making the reader browse, go back, skip, etc.

Many readers take their eye off the mark and get stuck in local or current events - starvation in Africa, war in the Mideast, ethnic cleansing, ecology, global warming, etc. Yet none of these has had any effect on the rate of the acquisition of knowledge. We have reached a point where progress is almost self-sustaining - the more we discover, the more we know how much we don't know. Like a boulder rolling down a hill, the rush to research, experiment and design shows no sign of slowing. I was less than impressed with the discussion about consciousness and the future of the universe. Does a machine that is aware that it is learning "conscious"? Is consciousness simply a function of having enought nodes operating in parallel? If spiritual machines come to fruition history will veer into new directions we cannot conceive.

An excellent and entertaining 1999 book on how computer capability may continue to evolve over the next century with some scarey possibilities, but nevertheless credible. Highly recommended.

This book speculates about both the advance of computer technology in the 21st century and the socio-political response to it. Although it is peppered with a few interesting notions worth skimming, much of the speculation is unreasonable and philosophically naive.

In the first chapter, Kurzweil attempts to lay a sort of theoretical framework for his speculations, which boils down to his belief that Moore's Law is just one instance of a cosmic principle of exponential advance which explains everything from the first second of the universe after the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth and now the evolution of technology. The second chapter argues that it is possible for an intelligence to create something more intelligent than itself: just as evolution "intelligently" created us, we will (soon!) create computers which will build machines of far greater cognitive ability than us. It is indeed intriguing to consider that someday machines will outperform humans in many ways, but the book to this point is best skimmed, because there's actually very little substance and a lot of dry, pseudo-intellectual filler.

Chapter 3 examines the philosophical problem that is going to be brought to the forefront by super-advanced computers: what is consciousness, and can machines possess it? Kurzweil unimpressively touches on a handful of schools of thought here (his sentences on Descartes made me wonder if he has read anything on the subject besides pop philosophy), though he does not try to decide between them. Instead, his prediction is social: eventually machines will be accepted as real people -- just as real people will physically merge with technology -- even if that sounds bizarre to us now. This theme comes up again and again, and it proves to be one of the only thought-provoking issues of the book.

Chapters 4 and 5 talk about the field of artificial intelligence, where it has been, and where it needs to go. In a section entitled "The Formula for Intelligence", Kurzweil provides his recipe for the strong AI of the future: recursion, neural nets, and genetic algorithms -- all taking hints from the reverse engineering of the human brain. This wishful thinking is one of the Achilles' heels of this book. For a software entrepreneuer, Kurzweil is strangely blind to the evidence: software is hardly becoming more complex or "intelligent" at all, let alone exponentially. Today's software systems are perhaps bigger but not significantly "smarter" than systems of past decades, and software quality continues to barely meet the lowest of expectations. Despite Moore's Law and the faith that it will continue to provide more and more cycles in the hardware world, progress in the world of software seems, to this software engineer of 15 years, to be nearly a flat line, not an exponential curve. Just compare how many hundreds of man-years have gone into the lastest version of Windows, versus what it would take to design and implement Kurzweil's ideal of software that is able to write more powerful software.

Part of the problem may be that Kurzweil simply ignores the fields of cognitive psychology and epistemology, which are in their infancy. He does not seem to even be aware of the issues in these fields which would have to be solved (probably by geniuses) in order to create "strong AI." Instead, the solutions he predicts are purely materialistic: brain deciphering, massively parallel hardware, and genetic algorithms.

Part 2 of the book focuses on potential technologies. The most powerful computers he speculates about are quantum computers, and he doesn't waste any time before asserting that someday we will be able to download the entirety of a brain into a quantum computer, so that the computer will in effect have a clone of that person's mind. Kurzweil, in his materialism, does not seem to even be aware that there is a philosophical argument that this is imposs