| | | | | |       Listen to Me       | | | | | |

Ray is about to publish a new book: The Age of Spirital Machines. One of the Kurzweil Alumni News members found the book at the Amazon.com web site. The following information is taken from their listing.

Acknowledgments

Prologue: An Inexorable Emergence
Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet. Actually, let me take that back. The truth of that last statement depends on how we define human.

Chapter One: The Law of Time And Chaos
For the past forty years, in accordance with Moore's Law, the power of transistor-based computing has been growing exponentially. But by the year 2020, transistor features will be just a few atoms thick, and Moore's Law will have run its course. What then? To answer this critical question, we need to understand the exponential nature of time.

Chapter Two: The Intelligence of Evolution
Can an intelligence create another intelligence more intelligent than itself? Are we more intelligent than the evolutionary process that created us? In turn, will the intelligence that we are creating come to exceed that of its creator? "I am lonely and bored, please keep me company." If your computer displayed this message on its screen, would that convince you that it is conscious and has feelings? Before you say no too quickly, we need to consider how such a plaintive message originated.

Chapter Three: Of Mind and Machines
"I am lonely and bored, please keep me company." If your computer displayed this message on its screen, would that convince you that it is conscious and has feelings? Before you say no too quickly, we need to consider how such a plaintive message originated.

Chapter Four: A New Form Of Intelligence On Earth
Intelligence rapidly creates satisfying, sometimes surprising plans that meet an array of constraints. Clearly, no simple formula can emulate this most powerful of phenomena. Actually, that's wrong. All that is needed to solve a surprisingly wide range of intelligent problems is exactly this: simple methods combined with heavy doses of computation, itself a simple process.

Chapter Five: Context and Knowledge
It is sensible to remember today's insights for tomorrow's challenges. It is not fruitful to rethink every problem that comes along. This is particularly true for humans, due to the extremely slow speed of our computing circuitry.

Part Two: Preparing the Present

Chapter Six: Building New Brains
Evolution has found a way around the computational limitations of neural circuitry. Cleverly, it has created organisms who in turn invented a computational technology a million times faster than carbon-based neurons. Ultimately, the computing conducted on extremely slow mammalian neural circuits will be ported to a far more versatile and speedier electronic (and photonic) equivalent.

Chapter Seven: . . . and Bodies
A disembodied mind will quickly get depressed. So what kind of bodies will we provide for our twenty-first-century machines? Later on, the question will become: What sort of bodies will they provide for themselves?

Chapter Eight: 1999
If all the computers in 1960 stopped functioning, few people would have noticed. Circa 1999 is another matter. Although computers still lack a sense of humor, a gift for small talk, and other endearing qualities of human thought, they are nonetheless mastering an increasingly diverse array of tasks that previously required human intelligence.

Part Three: To Face the Future

Chapter Nine: 2009
It is now 2009. A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second. Computers are imbedded in clothing and jewelry. Most routine business transactions take place between a human and a virtual personality. Translating telephones are commonly used. Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians. The neo-Luddite movement is growing.

Chapter Ten: 2019
A $1,000 computing device is now approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain. Computers are now largely invisible and are embedded everywhere. Three-dimensional virtual-reality displays, embedded in glasses and contact lenses, provide the primary interface for communication with other persons, the Web, and virtual reality. Most interaction with computing is through gestures and two-way natural-language spoken communication. Realistic all-encompassing visual, auditory, and tactile environments enable people to do virtually anything with anybody, regardless of physical proximity. People are beginning to have relationships with automated personalities as companions, teachers, caretakers, and lovers.

Chapter Eleven: 2029
A $1,000 unit of computation has the computing capacity of approximately one thousand human brains. Direct neural pathways have been perfected for high-bandwidth connection to the human brain. A range of neural implants is becoming available to enhance visual and auditory perception and interpretation, memory, and reasoning. Computers have read all available human- and machine-generated literature and multimedia material. There is growing discussion about the legal rights of computers and what constitutes being human. Machines claim to be conscious and these claims are largely accepted.

Chapter Twelve: 2099
There is a strong trend toward a merger of human thinking with the world of machine intelligence that the human species initially created. There is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers. Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence. Machine-based intelligences derived from extended models of human intelligence claim to be human. Most of these intelligences are not tied to a specific computational processing unit. The number of software-based humans vastly exceeds those still using native neuron-cell-based computation. Even among those human intelligences still using carbon-based neurons, there is ubiquitous use of neural-implant technology that provides enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities. Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do. Life expectancy is no longer a viable term in relation to intelligent beings.

Epilogue: The Rest of the Universe Revisited
Intelligent beings consider the fate of the universe.

Time Line

How to Build an Intelligent Machine In Three Easy Paradigms

Glossary

Notes

Suggested Readings

Copyright © Ray Kurzweil, 1998

Mike Brown, Chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, Former Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft
"A sage, compelling vision of the future from one of our nation's leading innovators. Ray Kurzweil brings serious science, common sense, aesthetic sensibility, and a twinkling sense of humor to the question of where we are headed with the machines we call computers. With his pioneering inventions, and his penetrating ideas, Kurzweil convincingly takes us to 'the other side,' in what promises to be the most pivotal of centuries."

George Gilder, Author of Wealth and Poverty, The Spirit of Enterprise, Microcosm, and Telecosm
"Ray Kurzweil, peerless inventor of such brain extenders as reading machines, speech recognition, and music synthesis, has now reinvented the book as a luminous synthesis of mind and machine. In a series of witty, ingenious, and profound meditations, he explores the metamorphic moment when machines will attain and then surpass the capabilities of the human brain. This is a book that makes all other roads to the computer future look like goat paths in Patagonia."

Stevie Wonder
"Ray's technology and ideas have truly been among the sunshines of my life. This book is a wonderful riff on the next century from a keen seer, a great inventor, and a good friend."

Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft
"Twenty years from now, predicts Ray Kurzweil, $1,000 computers will match the power of the human brain. Kurzweil offers a thought-provoking analysis of human and artificial intelligence and a unique look at a future in which the capabilities of the computer and the species that invented it grow ever closer."

Marvin Minsky, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, M.I.T.
"With these brilliant descriptions of coming connections of computers with immortality, Kurzweil clearly takes his place as a leading futurist of our time. He links the relentless growth of our future technology to a universe in which artificial intelligence and nanotechnology may combine to bring unimaginable wealth and longevity, not merely to our descendants, but to some of those living today."

The Publisher
Ray Kurzweil, called a "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal, is responsible for some of the most compelling technology of our era. The brains behind the Kurzweil Reading Machine (which helps Stevie Wonder read his mail), the Kurzweil synthesizer, and the voice-recognition program that appears on Windows 98, he is also a formidable thinker who a decade ago predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web and that a computer would beat the world chess champion. Finally, someone with the authority to speak about the future also has the courage and imagination to do so. The Age of Spiritual Machines is no list of predictions but a framework for envisioning the 21st century in which one advance or invention leads inexorably to another. After establishing that technology is growing exponentially, Kurzweil forecasts that computers will exceed the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain by 2020, with the other attributes of human intelligence not far behind. By that time paraplegics will be able to walk by using a combination of nerve stimulation and robotic devices. You will be able to choose the personality of your automated computer assistant, who will conduct business on your behalf with other automated personalities. A mere nine years later, you will be able to enhance your intelligence with neural implants. The upshot is that human identity will be called into question as never before, as a billion years of evolution are superseded in a mere hundred by machine technology that we ourselves have created. We will become cyborgs, but what will computers become?

Colin McGinn, The New York Times Book Review
...Kurzweil is more philosophically sensitive, and hence cautious, in his claims for computer consciousness... ranges widely over such juicy topics as entropy, chaos, the big bang, quantum theory, DNA computers... the whole world of information technology past, present and future... This is a book for computer enthusiasts, science fiction writers in search of cutting-edge themes and anyone who wonders where human technology is going next.

Library Journal
A heavyweight in the computer world who for several years wrote a column for LJ called "The Futurecast," Kurzweil predicts that computers will outstrip human intelligence by 2020.

Kirkus:
What will the world look like when computers are smarter than their owners? Kurzweil, the brains behind some of today's most brilliant machines, offers his insights. Kurzweil (The Age of Intelligent Machines) posits that technological progress moves at exponential rates. If we apply that standard to the future of computer evolution, another 20 years or so will give us machines with as much memory and intelligence as ourselves. This projection involves a certain faith in as yet unforeseeable technical breakthroughs. There is no obvious way to reduce the size of an electrical circuit beyond a few atoms' width, for example-but the speed of circuits is a function of their size. Kurzweil gets around this limit (known in the computer industry as Moore's Law) by suggesting a relationship between the pace of time and the degree of chaos in a system; as order increases, the interval between meaningful events decreases. In other words, a more highly evolved system will continue to evolve at increasing speed. While this seems more a matter of faith than an inevitable law of nature, the history of technology (as Kurzweil summarizes it) seems to bear out the relationship. He extrapolates the future of computer technology, offering both a detailed time line and imaginary dialogues with a fully intelligent computer from a hundred years in our future. (This sort of imaginative exercise inevitably partakes to some degree of science fiction.) The book's deliberately nonlinear organization offers a variety of paths through the subject matter, as well, and Kurzweil encourages the reader to take whichever approach is attractive. While much of the material (Turing tests, AI research) will be familiar to readers who have followed the growth of computer science, Kurzweil's broad outlook and fresh approach make his optimism hard to resist. Heavy going in spots, but an extremely provocative glimpse of what the next few decades may well hold.

About the Author
Ray Kurzweil is the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, which won the Association of American Publishers' Award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990. He was awarded the Dickson Prize, Carnegie Mellon's top science prize, in 1994. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology named him the Inventor of the Year in 1988. He is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and honors from two U.S. presidents. Kurzweil lives in a suburb of Boston.

Hardcover - 352 pages (January 1999) Viking Pr; ISBN: 0670882178

Boston Globe Review
New York Times Review

Amazon.com's web page for the book
BarnesAndNoble.com's web page for the book
Penguin Book's web page for the book