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ShareHow much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power.
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Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace.
Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa.
He calls this the "Law of Time and Chaos," and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously.
This means that we'd better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible--they'll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, but also likely demand civil rights, and might at last realize the very human dream of immortality.
The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible, and not necessarily best read from front to back--it's less heavily historical if you jump around (Kurzweil encourages this).
Much of the content of the book lays the groundwork to justify Kurzweil's timeline, providing an engaging primer on the philosophical and technological ideas behind the study of consciousness.
For more information about the title The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, read the full description at Amazon.com, or see the following related books:
On Intelligence — Jeff Hawkins, the high-tech success story behind PalmPilots and the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, does a lot of thinking about thinking. In On ... > read more
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology — For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his ... > read more
This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (Modern Library Paperbacks) — More comprehensive than The Right Stuff, more critical than Apollo 13, This New Ocean is a near-perfect history of the men (and occasional women) who ... > read more
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library) — An introduction to a new way of looking at history, from a perspective that stretches from the beginning of time to the present day, Maps of Time is ... > read moreRecommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
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