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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
Holy crap! Talk about a book to spend your life with. There's so much in it that you have to put it down every now and again to let everything sink in. Seriously, your brain will wake you with questions or answers about almost every facet of this book. Recommended reading for everyone on the planet earth, and then maybe we'll stop fighting each other. I could literally feel my brain expanding.
A heavy read, hard to comprehend at times, but interesting stuff nonetheless. If Kurzweil turns out to be right about his theories, there are some crazy implications.
I was giving this leeway for some of the more grandiose claims thinking it came out recently, but after finding out this was published in the mid 2000s, it's much harder to take any of it seriously.
Yes, this book is long. Yes, Kurzweil seems to repeat himself a lot. Yes, the dialogs at the end of every chapter/section are hilarious. And yes, some of the things that Kurzweil mentions in the book seem outlandish and like fantasies of an over optimistic inventor/scientist/futurist.
But all that is shadowed by the brilliance (even if imaginative, a thought I don't subscribe to) of the author and the constant discoveries one makes while reading the book.
If the future is what he says it is, I look forward to it. And though many might be skeptical about Kurzweil's abilities to predict future and future technologies, I personally think that if we achieve half of what he says we will, or take double the time to achieve it than he says we will, the future is something to look forward to.
Kurzweil has built the book up slowly. Giving real examples of research and developments in the fields of science and technology and he has, unlike other optimistic authors, provided both up and down sides of the technologies we can expect to see in a few decades.
This book may seem fictional, like an Asimov novel, but then Asimov was a futurist himself who predicted life that we are living or will live (very much like a self-fulfilling prophecy). But the book may be nearer to fact than one might believe.
For any science, technology or star trek type future enthusiast, this book is a must read. And I urge potential readers to be patient, as like I said at the start, the book is long and a bit boring at times.
But all that is shadowed by the brilliance (even if imaginative, a thought I don't subscribe to) of the author and the constant discoveries one makes while reading the book.
If the future is what he says it is, I look forward to it. And though many might be skeptical about Kurzweil's abilities to predict future and future technologies, I personally think that if we achieve half of what he says we will, or take double the time to achieve it than he says we will, the future is something to look forward to.
Kurzweil has built the book up slowly. Giving real examples of research and developments in the fields of science and technology and he has, unlike other optimistic authors, provided both up and down sides of the technologies we can expect to see in a few decades.
This book may seem fictional, like an Asimov novel, but then Asimov was a futurist himself who predicted life that we are living or will live (very much like a self-fulfilling prophecy). But the book may be nearer to fact than one might believe.
For any science, technology or star trek type future enthusiast, this book is a must read. And I urge potential readers to be patient, as like I said at the start, the book is long and a bit boring at times.
Imminent Metaphysics
The subtitle contains the entire thesis: an expectation that machines will allow human beings to escape the limitations of their physical bodies. This contention has been called ‘daring,’ ‘optimistic,’ ‘arresting,’ ‘really out there,’ ‘outrageous,’ ‘terrifying,’ and above all just ‘big.’ And certainly the idea that a machine can be linked to a brain to form what is effectively a new species is certainly that: Big. But in terms of bigness (as Trump would say) it’s a sideshow and not the main event. It’s just that the main event doesn’t sell nearly as many tickets.
Of course human beings already have transcended much of their biology long ago. Kurzweil’s own analysis in this and his previous books demonstrates this fact repeatedly. Humanity in its various sub-species did so through the core technology which he recognises as the source of just about all advances in human well-being and dispersion around the planet: the technology of language. It is language which permits both complicated and large-scale cooperation among individuals, and which allows experience to be codified and stored over generations. It is language - in the form of self-learning code - which is the foundation of the machines which Kurzweil envisions will be linked functionally to human brains in order to form a new sort of mind, a kind of Leibnizian monad, essentially disconnected from the world of its fellows, talking to itself in its own increasingly idiosyncratic language.
But there is an issue, or rather a central fact, of our current situation which Kurzweil ignores. Language is not the invention or the possession of an individual. It cannot be patented as a technology; it cannot be controlled in its development (despite the Academie Francaise and high school English teachers); and it requires a rather large population who implicitly assert its usefulness and right to survive. Language is a collective endeavour. Although it is a technology, it is not a machine. And, fatally for Kurzweil’s thesis, language has already freed the species Homo sapiens from the constraints of strict biology eons ago. It did so as a collective endeavour not as a connection between an individual human being and a machine.
Kurzweil (along with many others) are myopically fascinated by electronic machines and their coding. This is understandable. Machines are visible to everyone. They can be touched and measured and improved. They are the emblem of progress in industrial (or post-industrial) society. Language on the other hand is amorphous. It is visible only in its use, and then just barely as language-users habitually substitute things for words. Machines work; when they don’t they can be repaired. Languages work as well, but when language goes wrong, no one knows quite what to do about it. Machines may be complicated and their coded routines complex; but they are predictable in their operation even if surprise is the prediction. Language is largely a mystery; no one knows if it’s hard-wired in our genetic makeup or acquired randomly.
It is important to keep in mind that both machines and the human brain are shaped by language beyond their coding or genetic character. Certainly some genetic mutation in the history of our species allowed the transition from mere signalling to complex language-based communication. But from that moment (or evolutionary epoch), language transcended every individual who used it. Language was a communal technology or it didn’t exist at all. And it was the technology that allowed everything from cave painting to the Library of Congress. Language, that non-biological miracle of human existence, influenced genetic development itself, initially by setting rules about who could mate with whom, more recently through gene therapy.
So if there is a ‘singularity’ in our immediate future, it is not one of biological transcendence. It may, however, be one of a complete submission to the dominance of that which we have arrogantly presumed is our instrument. What Kurzweil describes is indeed a new species, perhaps one with an unlimited intellectual potential and an indefinite but very long lifespan. But this is a species whose entire world is language. It will have no other experience except in communication with other specific language-users. The species will not have transcended language, it will have been absorbed into it. The new species will be one entirely constituted by language. His book is “... predicated on the idea that we have the ability to understand our own intelligence—to access our own source code, if you will—and then revise and expand it.”
As Kurzweil says, the world formed by this new species with the altered source code will be peaceful; conflict will be about words, only in words. Greed will be unnecessary; words are infinitely abundant. Culture will flourish; words underpin not just technology but writing and arts of all kinds. The needs of our composite machine/brain existence - fuel, food, climate control - will be catered for. All the rest of our emotional, sexual, and aesthetic needs will be supplied by the language of our coding, which will pursue its own evolutionary path, presumably at an accelerating rate.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Kurzweil’s vision is superficially similar to that of Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noösphere.’ (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3138988240) Teilhard first used the term in his Cosmogenesis of 1922. Very much like Kurzweil, de Chardin adopted an evolutionary approach in his theological philosophy: the ‘geosphere’ of dead matter evolves the biosphere of living things, which generates the noösphere of pure reason. It is human cognition, that is to say, language, which is the driving force for the transition from the biosphere. Increasing complexity and consciousness creates a ‘layer’ of thought encircling the earth.
The difference between Kurzweil and de Chardin is that the phenomenon of the noösphere for Teilhard is communal. It emerges and is sustained through the interaction of minds not through the isolated, algorithmic cogitation of new kinds of minds. And Teilhard’s minds are not absorbed into the language from which they are constructed. The key relationship among minds for Teilhard is love, essentially existence for the sake of the other. That is, not for the sake of language as implied in Kurzweil’s vision. Rather, Teilhard’s vision is of what he calls the Omega Point, a state of perfect mutual regard and care. This state is not one of subordination to language but to each other through language. The evolution of language in that direction does not result in a transcendent new species living next to the old Homo sapiens, but in an entire society which transcends itself. Kurzweil, it occurs to me, is at heart an aesthete rather than a technologist; and his aesthetic is highly questionable.
This is all a matter of practical metaphysics, our imagining of that which lies beyond language. For most of modernity, by which I mean since the industrial revolution, metaphysics has been a field derided as philosophical self-abuse. The importance of all of Kurzweil’s work is its demonstration that metaphysics is an important social science. I understand his use of advances in electronic technology as a focal point. Among other things, it sells. Nevertheless, the significance of his own analysis is not about the new composite mind, it is about the relationship among minds and how these relationships can develop a world which is imminently liveable not transcendentally detached. This is a moral not a technical issue. I don’t know the answer to the situation he describes. But I think Teilhard has some good alternative suggestions.
The subtitle contains the entire thesis: an expectation that machines will allow human beings to escape the limitations of their physical bodies. This contention has been called ‘daring,’ ‘optimistic,’ ‘arresting,’ ‘really out there,’ ‘outrageous,’ ‘terrifying,’ and above all just ‘big.’ And certainly the idea that a machine can be linked to a brain to form what is effectively a new species is certainly that: Big. But in terms of bigness (as Trump would say) it’s a sideshow and not the main event. It’s just that the main event doesn’t sell nearly as many tickets.
Of course human beings already have transcended much of their biology long ago. Kurzweil’s own analysis in this and his previous books demonstrates this fact repeatedly. Humanity in its various sub-species did so through the core technology which he recognises as the source of just about all advances in human well-being and dispersion around the planet: the technology of language. It is language which permits both complicated and large-scale cooperation among individuals, and which allows experience to be codified and stored over generations. It is language - in the form of self-learning code - which is the foundation of the machines which Kurzweil envisions will be linked functionally to human brains in order to form a new sort of mind, a kind of Leibnizian monad, essentially disconnected from the world of its fellows, talking to itself in its own increasingly idiosyncratic language.
But there is an issue, or rather a central fact, of our current situation which Kurzweil ignores. Language is not the invention or the possession of an individual. It cannot be patented as a technology; it cannot be controlled in its development (despite the Academie Francaise and high school English teachers); and it requires a rather large population who implicitly assert its usefulness and right to survive. Language is a collective endeavour. Although it is a technology, it is not a machine. And, fatally for Kurzweil’s thesis, language has already freed the species Homo sapiens from the constraints of strict biology eons ago. It did so as a collective endeavour not as a connection between an individual human being and a machine.
Kurzweil (along with many others) are myopically fascinated by electronic machines and their coding. This is understandable. Machines are visible to everyone. They can be touched and measured and improved. They are the emblem of progress in industrial (or post-industrial) society. Language on the other hand is amorphous. It is visible only in its use, and then just barely as language-users habitually substitute things for words. Machines work; when they don’t they can be repaired. Languages work as well, but when language goes wrong, no one knows quite what to do about it. Machines may be complicated and their coded routines complex; but they are predictable in their operation even if surprise is the prediction. Language is largely a mystery; no one knows if it’s hard-wired in our genetic makeup or acquired randomly.
It is important to keep in mind that both machines and the human brain are shaped by language beyond their coding or genetic character. Certainly some genetic mutation in the history of our species allowed the transition from mere signalling to complex language-based communication. But from that moment (or evolutionary epoch), language transcended every individual who used it. Language was a communal technology or it didn’t exist at all. And it was the technology that allowed everything from cave painting to the Library of Congress. Language, that non-biological miracle of human existence, influenced genetic development itself, initially by setting rules about who could mate with whom, more recently through gene therapy.
So if there is a ‘singularity’ in our immediate future, it is not one of biological transcendence. It may, however, be one of a complete submission to the dominance of that which we have arrogantly presumed is our instrument. What Kurzweil describes is indeed a new species, perhaps one with an unlimited intellectual potential and an indefinite but very long lifespan. But this is a species whose entire world is language. It will have no other experience except in communication with other specific language-users. The species will not have transcended language, it will have been absorbed into it. The new species will be one entirely constituted by language. His book is “... predicated on the idea that we have the ability to understand our own intelligence—to access our own source code, if you will—and then revise and expand it.”
As Kurzweil says, the world formed by this new species with the altered source code will be peaceful; conflict will be about words, only in words. Greed will be unnecessary; words are infinitely abundant. Culture will flourish; words underpin not just technology but writing and arts of all kinds. The needs of our composite machine/brain existence - fuel, food, climate control - will be catered for. All the rest of our emotional, sexual, and aesthetic needs will be supplied by the language of our coding, which will pursue its own evolutionary path, presumably at an accelerating rate.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Kurzweil’s vision is superficially similar to that of Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noösphere.’ (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3138988240) Teilhard first used the term in his Cosmogenesis of 1922. Very much like Kurzweil, de Chardin adopted an evolutionary approach in his theological philosophy: the ‘geosphere’ of dead matter evolves the biosphere of living things, which generates the noösphere of pure reason. It is human cognition, that is to say, language, which is the driving force for the transition from the biosphere. Increasing complexity and consciousness creates a ‘layer’ of thought encircling the earth.
The difference between Kurzweil and de Chardin is that the phenomenon of the noösphere for Teilhard is communal. It emerges and is sustained through the interaction of minds not through the isolated, algorithmic cogitation of new kinds of minds. And Teilhard’s minds are not absorbed into the language from which they are constructed. The key relationship among minds for Teilhard is love, essentially existence for the sake of the other. That is, not for the sake of language as implied in Kurzweil’s vision. Rather, Teilhard’s vision is of what he calls the Omega Point, a state of perfect mutual regard and care. This state is not one of subordination to language but to each other through language. The evolution of language in that direction does not result in a transcendent new species living next to the old Homo sapiens, but in an entire society which transcends itself. Kurzweil, it occurs to me, is at heart an aesthete rather than a technologist; and his aesthetic is highly questionable.
This is all a matter of practical metaphysics, our imagining of that which lies beyond language. For most of modernity, by which I mean since the industrial revolution, metaphysics has been a field derided as philosophical self-abuse. The importance of all of Kurzweil’s work is its demonstration that metaphysics is an important social science. I understand his use of advances in electronic technology as a focal point. Among other things, it sells. Nevertheless, the significance of his own analysis is not about the new composite mind, it is about the relationship among minds and how these relationships can develop a world which is imminently liveable not transcendentally detached. This is a moral not a technical issue. I don’t know the answer to the situation he describes. But I think Teilhard has some good alternative suggestions.
Speaks of the coming "singularity", a point in human history of unprecedented technological progress, resulting in part as machines are able to improve themselves using AI. Kurzweil predicts the first AI to appear in 2029. Mostly worth the read just for the ideas.
I was of two minds about this book. I was fascinated by the possibility related to the subject but I was skeptical much of the time I was reading. As someone who has worked with Artificial Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and Expert Systems, I think the timelines are much longer than Kurzweil predicts but maybe he is right that the Singularity is inevitable at some time in the future.
Ray is an optimist by nature and I love it! His book is a whole argument on how technology is evolving exponentially and in which way.
Even though this book is a bit outdated in a few details, oh boy does he nail most of the predictions.
I'm a bit skeptical about some of the positivity in how quick and for good some technologies will be used, but hope I'm wrong on that aspect.
Can't wait to live and contribute for the Ray Kurzweil's vision of the future!
Even though this book is a bit outdated in a few details, oh boy does he nail most of the predictions.
I'm a bit skeptical about some of the positivity in how quick and for good some technologies will be used, but hope I'm wrong on that aspect.
Can't wait to live and contribute for the Ray Kurzweil's vision of the future!
Such great expertise, and so little insight! Erudite, polysyllabic, Kurzweil says in ten thousand words what could be said in a couple hundred, which doesn’t really do much for succinct, precise, and… well… good writing. You’d think it might be a little shorter, considering he definitely wrote this with only one hand (the other was busy maintaining his very visible and very uncomfortable techno-boner). He makes a lot of unfeasible and unbacked claims about what will be done by the end of “this decade” (meaning by 2010) which haven’t come to fruition (where is my pill that I can take and I can eat whatever I want? WHERE?)—I would give him a pass if he didn’t write so damn confidently. Apparently he, and only he, knows without a doubt the “destiny of the universe”--which is ultimately where all matter is fused with human intellect to become one vast and bodiless motherboard dictator god. Even within the first chapter my hackles rose—his weird assertions about what love is, his misunderstanding of evolution as a directed march toward sophistication and complexity, and his weird reassurance that even if people are uncomfortable with the singularity they’ll get over it because who doesn’t want to fuse man and machine and live forever as a literal god in virtual reality, every whim catered to by an army of AI slaves? This is some fuckin’ JRPG villain shit, I’m telling you.
Kurzweil’s predictions also seem to rely on infinite physical and human resources. The low prices of computers and their parts, the increased production of technology that perpetuates advancement is dependent on exploitation of laborers and finite deposits of materials, which... isn't necessarily a good thing. He also seems to assume that technological expansion is not going to be used to perpetuate the divide between rich and poor, to limit privacy and dissent, or to exploit others for profit. Kurzweil addresses these very pertinent issues in dialogues in which he talks down to technophobe and skeptic Molly 2004. “Poor people have cell phones, too,” is as good of an answer as we get. “Trust me, that won’t be a problem.” Of course it’s not a problem for him, since he seems to delight in fantasizing about a sci-fi neoliberal hellscape where the government can spy on you through drones the size of dust particles, where “pre-crime” is a thing, and where all warfare (because let’s face it, when this guy imagines the future he imagines the same sort of barbaric, selfish, unsustainable world but with better robots) is done via surveillance tech and nanobots so small and deadly they basically count as biochemical weapons.
I think his weird attitude toward people's relationship with tech can be summed up in his explanation of why digital books have not rendered ink and paper obsolete. “Books don’t run out of battery power,” he says. “The ink-to-page contrast is higher in physical books, the resolution of the words is better, and there’s too much glare in digital books.” Have you ever heard someone list these reasons as why they prefer real books? Of course not, because you probably know actual humans. Kurzweil utterly fails to mention many common reasons for liking physical books; nothing about the feel of a book in one’s hands, the satisfaction of closing a book after finishing, the sound of a turning page, the smell of paper, the pride in collection physical books for our shelves. In short, you know, the people bits.
“Nanotechnology has the potential to destroy all of civilization, but we still should do it to advance human ‘values’,” he says, though then he openly claims he does not know what those ‘values’ are. Kurzweil seems to think that the highest form of human values is to become bodiless, immortal grey-goo deities, infinitely wise and infinitely kind. The reality he describes in this book paints a different picture, one of an atrophied couch-CHUD with a god complex permanently locked into VR so he can constantly have mind-blowing virtual sex with anime girls while watching poor people in foreign countries get their limbs sliced off by billions of self-replicating nanobots. If this is the “destiny of the universe,” count me out.
Kurzweil’s predictions also seem to rely on infinite physical and human resources. The low prices of computers and their parts, the increased production of technology that perpetuates advancement is dependent on exploitation of laborers and finite deposits of materials, which... isn't necessarily a good thing. He also seems to assume that technological expansion is not going to be used to perpetuate the divide between rich and poor, to limit privacy and dissent, or to exploit others for profit. Kurzweil addresses these very pertinent issues in dialogues in which he talks down to technophobe and skeptic Molly 2004. “Poor people have cell phones, too,” is as good of an answer as we get. “Trust me, that won’t be a problem.” Of course it’s not a problem for him, since he seems to delight in fantasizing about a sci-fi neoliberal hellscape where the government can spy on you through drones the size of dust particles, where “pre-crime” is a thing, and where all warfare (because let’s face it, when this guy imagines the future he imagines the same sort of barbaric, selfish, unsustainable world but with better robots) is done via surveillance tech and nanobots so small and deadly they basically count as biochemical weapons.
I think his weird attitude toward people's relationship with tech can be summed up in his explanation of why digital books have not rendered ink and paper obsolete. “Books don’t run out of battery power,” he says. “The ink-to-page contrast is higher in physical books, the resolution of the words is better, and there’s too much glare in digital books.” Have you ever heard someone list these reasons as why they prefer real books? Of course not, because you probably know actual humans. Kurzweil utterly fails to mention many common reasons for liking physical books; nothing about the feel of a book in one’s hands, the satisfaction of closing a book after finishing, the sound of a turning page, the smell of paper, the pride in collection physical books for our shelves. In short, you know, the people bits.
“Nanotechnology has the potential to destroy all of civilization, but we still should do it to advance human ‘values’,” he says, though then he openly claims he does not know what those ‘values’ are. Kurzweil seems to think that the highest form of human values is to become bodiless, immortal grey-goo deities, infinitely wise and infinitely kind. The reality he describes in this book paints a different picture, one of an atrophied couch-CHUD with a god complex permanently locked into VR so he can constantly have mind-blowing virtual sex with anime girls while watching poor people in foreign countries get their limbs sliced off by billions of self-replicating nanobots. If this is the “destiny of the universe,” count me out.
Crazy reading. Added stars for the concepts, not necessarily for the merit. Definitely changed the way I read technology news.