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BOOKS
The machine of a new soul

Can 'intelligent' machines ever be spiritual beings? High-tech prognasticator Ray Kurzweil thinks so

By Chet Raymo, 12/27/98

"There's no reason for individuals to have a computer in their home," pronounced Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., in 1977. Twenty-one years later, computers are ubiquitous - not just in our homes but in our automobiles, appliances, and personal organizers.

In 1981, Microsoft's Bill Gates opined that "640,000 bytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody." Today, even bottom-of-the-line personal computers exceed that amount of memory by a factor of 500.

And who could have predicted the explosive growth of the Internet, which in just a few years has transformed the way humans exchange information with one another and generated commerce that may soon exceed $1 trillion?

Ray Kurzweil has a better record than most at foreseeing the digital future. His 1990 book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines," anticipated with uncanny accuracy most of the key computer developments that unfolded during the '90s.

Kurzweil's credentials as computer guru are impeccable. He is inventor of the first commercially marketed speech-recognition system, the first computer music keyboard capable of accurately reproducing the sounds of real orchestra instruments, the first system that can recognize all forms of alphabetic characters, the first system for text-to-synthesized-speech, and other key developments in making machines behave more like us.

When his earlier book was published, Kurzweil's predictions seemed boldly futuristic, pushing the envelope of science fiction. But if anything, his prognostications were conservative. A computer defeated the world chess champion several years before Kurzweil predicted it would happen. And though he foresaw a universal information network linking almost all organizations and millions of individuals, he apparently did not anticipate how quickly and dramatically the World Wide Web would alter the cyber-landscape.

Kurzweil's key prediction in the 1990 book was that machines will equal human intelligence sometime during the middle of the next century. Intelligence here is defined by the so-called "Turing test," named for the early computer theoretician Alan Turing: A committee of human experts, interrogating a computer remotely, try to decide if their correspondent is a human or a machine. That is to say, when a machine can carry on a conversation about life, love, mathematics, philosophy, theology, or anything else under the sun, and be indistinguishable in its responses from a human, then for all practical purposes we must concede the machine a human level of intelligence.

In his new book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines," Kurzweil now predicts that computers will pass the Turing test within 20 years, although the outcome of the test will for a time be controversial. Within 30 years he believes machines will claim to be conscious, and that these claims will be widely accepted. Further, he believes that late in the next century machines will far surpass human intelligence, and be capable of "a feeling of transcending one's everyday physical and mortal bounds to sense a deeper reality" - that is, spiritual experience.

His predictions are based on a well-established trend and on a strategy for developing artificial intelligence.

The trend is illustrated by a graph in the book showing the amount of computing power (calculations per second) that can be bought with $1,000. Throughout this century, the curve has been rising exponentially, doubling about every 20 months. At this rate, $1,000 worth of machine will achieve the computing power of the human brain by the year 2020, and exceed the computing power of all humans on the planet by 2060.

To ensure that machines of the future become truly intelligent, Kurzweil pumps for the strategy of building computers on the model of the neural networks of the human brain, then letting them interact with the world, learning from their successes and failures, effectively programming themselves by a kind of Darwinian natural selection. This strategy is already yielding important results in business, science, and medicine.

By the end of the 21st century, neural-network machines will be capable of all forms of conscious experience, says Kurzweil, including those experiences that come from having an artificial, humanlike body. Meanwhile, human bodies and minds will be greatly augmented by technology. Kurzweil paints a tantalizing - and sometimes terrifying - portrait of a world where the line between humans and machines has become thoroughly blurred.

All of which challenges one of our most earnestly held beliefs, about the uniqueness and transcendence of the human soul.

Is it possible that machines will become conscious, even spiritual, as Kurzweil predicts? Will they have personalities? Will they become our superiors at activities ranging from art to science to prayerful meditation?

These are questions that philosophers have endlessly debated and will continue to debate for decades to come. However, they are questions that in a sense have certain answers: We need only wait and see. If present trends hold true, we will not have to wait for more than one human lifetime.

If there is something about the human soul that is independent of our physical bodies, then, of course, machines will never achieve soulfulness. However, if a human self is defined by the interaction of an incredibly complex biological machine with the world, then there is no reason to suppose that machines will not equal and surpass any human quality.

Kurzweil's new book, like its predecessor, is a welcome challenge to beliefs we hold dear. Welcome, because we can shape the future only if we correctly anticipate where we are going. If we stumble into the future willy-nilly, guided only by economic forces, then the Age of Spiritual Machines is - in Kurzweil's view - inevitable, for better or worse.

And I happen to think that he is right.

This story ran on page L01 of the Boston Globe on 12/27/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.