The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

When it was first written 20 years ago, it must have had quite an impact. The books insights have lost its freshness in today's world, and are starting to enter into the territory of the everyday.

Driving the books insights is Kurzweil's law of time and chaos. Taking an evolutionary approach with a wide cosmological lens (from the Big Bang onwards), Kurzweil develops this Law: "In a process, the time interval between salient events expands or contracts along with the amount of chaos" (p. 29). This means that with more chaos, time exponentially slows down (time interval between salient events increases) and on the contrary, with more order, time exponentially speeds up. 

He derives this law from several sources, like the Big Bang, in which a whole bunch of salient events like formation of various basic particles occurred within the first second, before becoming subject to entropy and expansion, and biological evolution, which uses an internally growing order and the chaos from the external world as its material for exponential growth.

This leads to his discussion on technology. Made from human ingenuity, the evolution of technology is also exponentially growing and the accelerating evolution of technology allows us to escape the fetters of biological evolution. "Human intelligence, a product of evolution, is far more intelligent than its creator" and intelligent technology will also build on evolution to become more intelligent than its creators, homo sapiens sapiens.

Kurzweil synthesizes different schools of research to explore different implications, like the issue of consciousness (can machines have a "ghost"?), different schools of AI programming (recursive vs neural nets etc), the future human and machine bodies, and more. The research was very well done, and although I thought that Kurzweil is only a hard sciences type of guy, he brings in sources like American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who from my knowledge, focuses on Heidegger, the existentialists, and other continental philosophers.

Reading this book gave me access to research way outside of my field, like the mysteries of quantum physics and quantum computers (while digital computing relies on bits that are either zero or one, quantum computing uses qu-bits "which are essentially zero and one at the same time [!!!]" (p. 110)), which will have computational abilities far exceeding our current capacities.

Kurzweil ends the book with his predictions for the decades to come (1999, 2009, 2019, 2029, 2099; I feel old reading about predictions made in the past about the present time I am in), and they are quite prescient ("privacy continues to become a major political and social issue with each individual's practically every move stored in a database somewhere" (p. 207)) although sometimes optimistic.

Kurzweil's 2099 is a world where the ideology of individuality is replaced with a cybernetic reality of fluidity, of floating immaterial minds inhabiting bodies, and a world where "the struggle is discovering new knowledge to learn" (p. 245).

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