The Age of Spiritual Machines
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a non-fiction book by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil about artificial intelligence and the future course of humanity. First published in hardcover on January 1, 1999, by Viking, it has received attention from The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. In the book Kurzweil outlines his vision for how technology will progress during the 21st century.
Author
January 1, 1999
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Kurzweil believes evolution provides evidence that humans will one day create machines more intelligent than they are. He presents his law of accelerating returns to explain why "key events" happen more frequently as time marches on. It also explains why the computational capacity of computers is increasing exponentially. Kurzweil writes that this increase is one ingredient in the creation of artificial intelligence; the others are automatic knowledge acquisition and algorithms like recursion, neural networks, and genetic algorithms.
Kurzweil predicts machines with human-level intelligence will be available from affordable computing devices within a couple of decades, revolutionizing most aspects of life. He says nanotechnology will augment our bodies and cure cancer even as humans connect to computers via direct neural interfaces or live full-time in virtual reality. Kurzweil predicts the machines "will appear to have their own free will" and even "spiritual experiences".[1] He says humans will essentially live forever as humanity and its machinery become one and the same. He predicts that intelligence will expand outward from Earth until it grows powerful enough to influence the fate of the universe.
Reviewers appreciated Kurzweil's track record with predictions, his ability to extrapolate technology trends, and his clear explanations. However, there was disagreement on whether computers will one day be conscious. Philosophers John Searle and Colin McGinn insist that computation alone cannot possibly create a conscious machine. Searle deploys a variant of his well-known Chinese room argument, this time tailored to computers playing chess, a topic Kurzweil covers. Searle writes that computers can only manipulate symbols which are meaningless to them, an assertion which if true subverts much of the vision of the book.
Content[edit]
Law of accelerating returns[edit]
Kurzweil opens by explaining that the frequency of universe-wide events has been slowing down since the Big Bang while evolution has been reaching important milestones at an ever-increasing pace. This is not a paradox, he writes, entropy (disorder) is increasing overall, but local pockets of increasing order are flourishing. Kurzweil explains how biological evolution leads to technology which leads to computation which leads to Moore's law.[6]
Kurzweil unveils several laws of his own related to this progression, leading up to his law of accelerating returns which says time speeds up as order increases.[7] He believes Moore's law will end "by the year 2020" but that the law of accelerating returns mandates progress will continue to accelerate, therefore some replacement technology will be discovered or perfected to carry on the exponential growth.[8]
In other media[edit]
The Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace based their 2000 concept album Spiritual Machines on The Age of Spiritual Machines. They recruited Kurzweil to voice several tracks, on which he read select passages from the book.[35] On October 29, 2021, Our Lady Peace released a sequel album, Spiritual Machines 2, as an NFT that was made available on January 28, 2022, in traditional formats. [36]