The Age of Intelligent Machines
The Age of Intelligent Machines is a non-fiction book about artificial intelligence by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. This was his first book and the Association of American Publishers named it the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990.[1] It was reviewed in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor. The format is a combination of monograph and anthology with contributed essays by artificial intelligence experts such as Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, and Marvin Minsky.[2]
Author
English
1990
United States
580
006.3-dc20
Q335.K87 1990
Kurzweil surveys the philosophical, mathematical and technological roots of artificial intelligence, starting with the assumption that a sufficiently advanced computer program could exhibit human-level intelligence. Kurzweil argues the creation of humans through evolution suggests that humans should be able to build something more intelligent than themselves. He believes pattern recognition, as demonstrated by vision, and knowledge representation, as seen in language, are two key components of intelligence. Kurzweil details how quickly computers are advancing in each domain.
Driven by the exponential improvements in computer power, Kurzweil believes artificial intelligence will be possible and then commonplace. He explains how it will impact all areas of people's lives, including work, education, medicine, and warfare. As computers acquire human level faculties Kurzweil says people will be challenged to figure out what it really means to be human.
Background[edit]
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and serial entrepreneur. In 1990 when this book was published he had already started three companies: Kurzweil Computer Products, Kurzweil Music Systems, and Kurzweil Applied Intelligence. The companies developed and sold reading machines for the blind, music synthesizers, and speech recognition software respectively.[3] Optical character recognition, which he used in the reading machine, and speech recognition are both featured centrally in the book as examples of pattern recognition problems.[4][5] After the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines he expanded on its ideas with two follow-on books: The Age of Spiritual Machines and the best selling The Singularity is Near.[6]
Style[edit]
Sprinkled throughout the book are 23 essays, 4 of them by Kurzweil himself and 19 others by invited authors: Margaret Litvin, Daniel Dennett, Mitchell Waldrop, Sherry Turkle, Blaine Mathieu, Seymour Papert, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Edward Feigenbaum, Jeff Pepper, K. Fuchi, Brian Oakley, Harold Cohen, Charles Ames, Michael Lebowitz, Roger Schank and Christopher Owens, Allen Newell, Margaret Boden, and George Gilder.[35] The book closes with a "chronology" listing events from the age of the dinosaurs to the year 2070,[36] fifty pages of end notes and suggested readings,[37] a glossary[38] and an index.[39]
Reception[edit]
Jay Garfield in the New York Times wrote that Kurzweil is "clear, current and informative" when writing about areas he has worked directly in, but "sloppy and vague" when talking about philosophy, logic and psychology. Of the prediction for a "translating telephone" by the first decade of the 21st century, Garfield says Kurzweil overlooks "the mammoth difficulties that confront anyone who tries to accomplish such a task".[40]
The Futurist calls it an "impressive volume" which is "handsomely illustrated" and "a feast for the mind and eye".,[41] while Simson Garfinkel in The Christian Science Monitor says The Age of Intelligent Machines is "a tour de force history of artificial intelligence" yet laments that "although the book is orderly, it is not organized" and complains that "details are missing throughout".[42]
Linda Strauss, writing for Science, Technology, & Human Values, calls the book "a rich assemblage of glittering parts, rather awkwardly joined". She points out that Kurzweil really cannot define artificial intelligence, the subject of the book, because he cannot define intelligence. Instead he relies on the Turing test and on Marvin Minsky's notion of intelligence as a moving horizon of unsolved problems. Strauss feels Kurzweil does not consider the cultural and societal implications of his futuristic visions.[43]