The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil (PDF)

Description

Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century–an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweil’s prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably result in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com Review How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we’d better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we’ve only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. He calls this the “Law of Time and Chaos,” and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously. This means that we’d better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible–they’ll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, but also likely demand civil rights, and might at last realize the very human dream of immortality.The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible, and not necessarily best read from front to back–it’s less heavily historical if you jump around (Kurzweil encourages this). Much of the content of the book lays the groundwork to justify Kurzweil’s timeline, providing an engaging primer on the philosophical and technological ideas behind the study of consciousness. Instead of being a gee-whiz futurist manifesto, Spiritual Machines reads like a history of the future, without too much science fiction dystopianism. Instead, Kurzweil shows us the logical outgrowths of current trends, with all their attendant possibilities. This is the book we’ll turn to when our computers first say “hello.” –Therese Littleton Review “This is a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next”.– The New York Times Book Review From the Back Cover Step into the world of Ray Kurzweil, the “restless genius” (Wall Street Journal) and “ultimate thinking machine” (Forbes), whose predictions for an age in which man and machine are interchangeable are startling, provocative — and closer to realization than you think.Imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between humanity and technology fades, and where the soul and the silicon chip unite. This is not science fiction. This is the twenty-first century according to Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era. In his inspired hands, life in the new millennium no longer seems daunting. Instead, it promises to be an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live.More than just a list of predictions, Kurzweil’s prophetic blueprint for the future guides us through the inexorable advances that will result in: computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Eventually, the distinction between humans and computers will have become sufficiently blurred that when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them. About the Author Ray Kurzweil is a prize-winning author and scientist. Recipient of the MIT-Lemelson Prize (the world’s largest for innovation), and inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame, he received the 1999 National Medal of Technology. His books include The Age of SpiritualMachines and The Age of Intelligent Machines.Visit Ray Kurzweil on the web:http://www.kurzweiltech.comhttp://www.kurzweilai.net/ Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐[NOTE: page numbers below refer to a 388-page paperback edition.]Raymond Kurzweil (born 1948) is a best-selling author, futurist, and a director of engineering for Google. He wrote in the Prologue of this 1999 book, “the human species is still challenged by issues and difficulties not altogether different than those with which it has struggled since the beginning of it recorded history. The twenty-first century will be different. The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems of need, if not desire… Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet… The pace of change is accelerating and has been since the inception of invention… The result will be far greater transformations in the first two decades of the twenty-first century than we saw in the entire twentieth century.” (Pg. 2)He continues, “our most advanced computers are still simpler than the human brain—currently about a million times simpler… But this disparity will not remain the case as we go through the early part of the next century… with computers achieving the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain by around the year 2020. Achieving the basic complexity of the human brain will not automatically result in computers matching the flexibility of human intelligence… the software of intelligence… is equally important. One approach to emulating the brain’s software is through reverse-engineering—scanning a human brain (which will be achievable early in the next century) and essentially copying its neural circuitry in a neural computer (a computer designed to simulate a massive number of human neurons) of sufficient capacity.“There is a plethora of credible scenarios for achieving human-level intelligence in a machine. We will be able to evolve and train a system combining massively parallel neural nets with other paradigms to understand language and model knowledge, including the ability to read and understand written documents… Computers will be able to read on their own, understanding and modeling what they have read, by the second decade of the twenty-first century… Ultimately, the machines will gather knowledge on their own by venturing into the physical world, drawing from the full spectrum of media and information services, and sharing knowledge with each other… Once a computer achieves a human level of intelligence, it will necessarily roar past it… In the second decade of the next century, it will become increasingly difficult to draw any clear distinction between the capabilities of human and machine intelligence. The advantages of computer intelligence in terms of speed, accuracy, and capacity will be clear. The advantages of human intelligence, on the other hand, will become increasingly difficult to distinguish.” (Pg. 3-4)He observes, “A frequent criticism of predictions of the future is that they rely on mindless extrapolation of current trends without consideration of forces that may terminate or alter that trend. This criticism is particularly relevant in the case of exponential trends… Based on this, some observers are quick to predict the demise of the exponential growth of computing. But the growth predicted by the Law of Accelerating Returns is an exception to the frequently cited limitations to exponential growth… Ultimately, the innovation needed for further turns of the screw will come from the machines themselves… there are more than enough new computing technologies waiting in the wings—nanotube, optical, crystalline, DNA, and quantum… to keep the Law of Accelerating Returns going in the world of computation for a very long time.” (Pg. 33-35)He asserts, “[DNA is] a very inefficient programmer. Most of the code—97 percent according to current estimates—does not compute… and appear to be useless. That means that the active part of the code is only about 23 megabytes, which is less than the code for Microsoft Word. The code is also replete with redundancies. For example, an apparently meaningless sequence called ‘Alu,’ comprising 300 nucleotide letters, occurs 300,000 times in the human genome, representing more than 3 percent of our genetic program.” (Pg. 41-42)He suggests that a future individual [that he calls ‘Jack’] “will have the option of scanning his entire brain and neural system… and replacing it with electronic circuits of far greater capacity, speed, and reliability. There’s also the benefit of keeping a backup copy in case anything happened to the physical Jack… Have we lost Jack somewhere along the line? Jack’s friends think not. Jack also claims that he’s the same old guy, just newer. His hearing, vision, memory, and reasoning ability have all improved… But what about Jack’s old brain and body? … these still exist. This is Jack! … Jack may not even be aware of whether or not a new Jack is ever created. And for that matter, we can create more than one new Jack… we can argue that any process of transferring Jack amounts to the old Jack committing suicide, and that the new Jack is not the same person.” (Pg. 53-54)He states, “The issue of consciousness and free will has been, of course, a major preoccupation of religious thought… [There] are theories by contemporary philosophers that regard consciousness as yet another fundamental phenomenon in the world… I call this the ‘consciousness is a different kind of stuff’ school… To the extent that it keeps its mysticism simple, it offers limited objective insight, although subjective insight is another matter (I do have to admit a fondness for simple mysticism).” (Pg. 60) He also notes his “Unitarian religious education.” (Pg. 61)After noting the triumph of the Deep Blue computer over chess champion Gary Kasparov, he states, “I believe that from this perspective we will ultimately find that there are no human activities that require ‘real’ intelligence.” (Pg. 69)He acknowledges, “Does the simple neuron model we have been discussing match the way human neurons work? The answer is yes and no. On the one hand, human neurons are more complex and more varied than the model suggests. The connection strengths are controlled by multiple neurotransmitters and are not sufficiently characterized by a single number. The brain is not a single organ, but a collection of hundreds of specialized information-processing organs, each having different topologies and organizations. On the other hand… we find that much of the complexity of neuron design and structure has to do with supporting the neuron’s life processes and is not directly relevant to the way it handles information… Developing a catalog of the basic paradigms that the neural nets in our brains are using—each relatively simple in its own way—will represent a great advance in our understanding of human intelligence and in our ability to re-create and surpass it.” (Pg. 80)He contends, “Downloading knowledge will be one of the benefits of the neural-implant technology. We’ll have implants that extend our capacity for retaining knowledge, for enhancing memory. Unlike nature, we won’t leave out a quick knowledge downloading port in the electronic version of our synapses. So it will be feasible to quickly download knowledge to these electronic extensions of our brains. Of course, when we fully port our minds to a new computational medium, downloading knowledge will become even easier.” (Pg. 97)He predicts, “we get the year 2025 to achieve human brain capacity in a $1,000 [computer]… I believe that the 2020 estimate is more accurate because by 2020, most of the computations performed in our computers will be of the neural-connection type.” (Pg. 103)He goes on, “A more challenging but also ultimately feasible scenario will be to scan someone’s brain to map the locations, interconnections, and contents of the somas, axons, dendrites, presynaptic vesicles, and other neural components. Its entire organization could then be recreated on a neural computer of sufficient capacity including the contents of its memory. This is harder … than the scanning-the-brain-to-understand-it scenario… On the other hand, we don’t need to understand all of it, we need only to literally copy it, connection by connection… It requires us to understand local brain processes, but not necessarily the brain’s global organization, at least not in full. It is likely that by the time we can do this, we will understand much of it, anyway… How well will this work? Of course, like any new technology, it won’t be perfect at first, and initial downloads will be somewhat imprecise. Small imperfections won’t necessarily be immediately noticeable… reinstating (reinstalling) a person’s brain should alter a person’s mind no more than it changes from day to day.” (Pg. 124-125)He argues, “Actually there won’t be mortality by the end of the twenty-first century. Not in the sense that we have known it. Not if you take advantage of the twenty-first century’s brain-porting technology. Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our HARDWARE… As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file. We will be SOFTWARE, not hardware… As software, our mortality will no longer be dependent on the survival of the computing circuitry… Our immortality will be a matter of being sufficiently careful to make frequent backups. If we’re careless about this, we’ll have to load an old backup copy and be doomed to repeat our recent past.” (Pg. 128-129)He proposes, “Just being—experiencing, being conscious—is spiritual, and reflects the essence of spirituality. Machines, derived from human thinking and surpassing humans in their capacity for experience, will claim to be conscious, and thus to be spiritual. They will believe that they are conscious. They believe that they have spiritual experiences. They will be convinced that these experiences are meaningful. And given the historical inclination of the human race to anthropomorphize the phenomena we encounter, and the persuasiveness of the machines, we’re likely to believe them when they tell us this. Twenty-first century machines…will do as their human progenitors have done—going to real and virtual houses of worship, meditating, praying, and transcending—to connect with their spiritual dimension.” (Pg. 153)Kurzweil then includes four pages in which “I get to toot my own horn, and can share with you those predictions of mine that worked out particularly well. But in looking back at the many predictions I’ve made over the last twenty years, I will say that I haven’t found any that I find particularly embarrassing.” (Pg. 170-173, 178) Of course, his predictions for the first two decades of the 21st century (some of which are quoted above) don’t seem to have worked out as well. His suggestions that we will soon be able to simply ‘scan the human brain’ seem quite unrealistic, for example. His comments about “junk DNA” and the ‘Alu elements’ are now known to be wrong, for another example. But this book is a very stimulating vision, that will be “must reading” for those considering the future, and the development of computers and technology.

⭐The argument here starts with the observation that intelligent machines are already a reality. In the future we will be able to create ever more intelligent machines. A truly explosive increase in machine intelligence is described, up to unimaginable levels only 100 years from now.As far as hardware is concerned, the author insists that Moore’s law, according to which computing power at a given cost doubles every 18 months, will continue unabated. Current computer technology will hit fundamental physical constrains in about 10 years, but the author insists that intelligence will find a way to grow explosively without slowing down because of mere physics. He describes several potential avenues through which computer power can increase. The most intriguing one is the possibility of building quantum computers. According to theory these can have immense computing power, because quantum phenomena allow for a huge number of calculations to be done in parallel. Nature does never give something for nothing, and, for my taste, quantum computers come too close to the edge – but who knows?More interesting is the question of software. When I was a student I was taught that hardware power is not very significant for defining the reach of computers, because algorithmic complexity almost always grows exponentially when related to the size of the problem to be solved. So fundamental advances will come from better algorithms, not from increased hardware power. The current state of affairs seems to agree with this view. After all, word processing 20 years ago using an Apple II is not fundamentally different from word processing today using computers a thousand times more powerful. Algorithmic design is a very costly process that few humans can do well, and this fact, it seems, would necessarily frustrate the rapid increase in machine intelligence. The author produces two solutions: One, to dissect a human brain and copy its “algorithm”. To me this sounds rather similar to Da Vinci’s idea of dissecting birds in order to build a flying machine. The second solution refers to methods where the algorithm builds itself, i.e. learns how to work. Two methodologies are mentioned here, genetic algorithms and neural nets. Many examples are given about the successful use of these to solve surprisingly difficult problems. These are powerful ideas. Certainly if we come to a point where an intelligent machine can design and maybe build an even more intelligent machine, then indeed we have the ingredients for a runaway explosion of intelligence.The author paints a rather scary near future. First we use machines to broaden our own minds, but we also build independent machines that become more and more powerful. The war between conscious machines and humans never happens, because it is won by the machines before it even starts: Human minds migrate into machines and lead a fruitful life within the more expansive means that this new medium offers. A few biological humans remain at a much lower level of intelligence, and presumably wilt away without remorse or bitterness. The next level of evolution is achieved by beings that are unimaginably more intelligent than we are now. At this stage it is not meaningful to talk about machines, they are just our offspring living in bodies that are not DNA based. In fact these immortal beings include persons originally born as humans, including, it is stated, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Again, all of this will happen in the next 100 years.Now, what is wrong in this picture, apart from the idea of having Bill Gates around for all eternity?For starters, for this vision to work the whole world should be like California, which it is not. On most places of this planet misery rather than intelligence rules. The book was written before the techno-bubble burst, an event not predicted in the book, and also before the recent power failures in California itself. The earth is in such bad working order that one must wonder if ever intelligence will take hold.Also, if the explosion of intelligence is a necessary natural phenomenon, something like an unstoppable supernova, then by now the universe should be full of manifestations of intelligence, it should be infused, drenched, saturated by intelligence. Why, entire suns would be cloaked in order to harvest their energy needed for the huge amount of computations going on. (Maybe this explains the mystery of the dark matter, i.e. the fact that most matter in the universe is not visible.) Also, why hasn’t this cosmic intelligent fabric reached us? Well, maybe they wanted to leave part of the universe in its natural state, you know like we keep protected nature parks. Our corner of the universe may be just such a place. We do not listen to the noise created by intelligence elsewhere, but maybe this only shows our low level of development.Now, if we assume that the universe is not really intelligent, this leaves us with three possibilities: First, for some reason there may exist intrinsic limits to the growth of intelligence. This does not seem probable, particularly after reading this book. Second, depressingly, the explosive growth of intelligence may always bring about its demise, the same way that the uncontrolled growth of cancer kills the organism that creates it. This sounds rather plausible if we observe the way humanity manages the world today. The third possibility is that the growth of intelligence reaches a level where it decides to stop, where it understands that the “law of accelerating returns” is not conducive to happiness. So maybe the universe is filled not only by intelligent, but also by wise races, that look after their own small garden without disturbing the rest of creation, and live meaningful, biological, limited lives.All in all, this is an extremely interesting book to read. I withhold one star, only because I find that the catchy title has little relevance to its content.

⭐I had been discussing with a friend about computer design and he suggested I read this mans work.It is fascinating and definitely worth reading if you are interested in the progress and future possibilities that computers hold. Possibly a little out of date now but a great introduction to the subject matter.

⭐Quick delivery. Good product.

⭐Good book.

⭐It is interesting to read this older book after the more recent ones. It reveals some of the ideological axioms and methodological traits and mistakes that he started from. And unluckily it is necessary to go back to basics at times when you are dealing with a bestselling author in a field where it is easy to predict the future, even the future of the world, the field of technology and what’s more information technology.Ray Kurzweil with more recent books took us into the clouds of his cloud computing and appeared on these clouds like some Messiah who was the rainmaker of the apocalypse, that time when humans will be taken over by another world entirely dominated by a non-human intelligence, even if created originally by man himself. He tries to be the prophet of the future of a world created by evolution stated as intelligent (whose intelligence?) and later by man’s intelligence, and then destroyed for plain humans by the machines created by this human intelligence. The vision is a mixture of Terminator 1-2-3-4, Matrix 1-2-3, The Stand, and The Book of Revelation. He even gives at the end of this here book the four Horses of the Apocalypse page 256: Red War (“the species may destroy itself before achieving this step”), White Political Power (“a malfunction,” hence a problem in the system whose constitution is not clear cut), the Black Justice or Commerce and their scales (“a software virus” introduced by the badly designed software or by a pirate or hacker) and the Pale Green Pestilence (a “real biological virus” devised and accidentally, on purpose from the machine or on purpose from a malevolent human with reference to the example of “HIV”)But this enormous metaphor, always present in this book, is quite often expressed when speaking of the beginning of the world, the creation of the Universe, the Big Bang, the end of the world, the end of the Universe, the Big Crunch or the Whimper, the beginning of time and the end of time, etc, the total domination with the alpha and the omega, that basic biblical, Jewish, Christian and Islamic concept that time has a first instant and will have a last instant and both were decided by some God. He even manages to present the God’s spot of some epileptic god-fearing patients who see God in their trances, and that vision is identified in one spot in their brain in such a way that we may believe it is true for everyman on earth, hence that God is in every single one of our brains.This is clandestine and yet widely open religious ideology directly borrowed from the basic sacred books of the three Semitic religions. He could have quoted easily the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls and the Koran. But he kept his quotations secret. Too bad. When one is speaking religion it is important that this one says so and give the references not to be accused of plagiarism.Let’s start with time. Time does not exist in reality, in the real world. Only duration does and time was invented by human beings as soon as they tried to measure that duration. So it is absurd to speak of an acceleration of time or of a deceleration of time. We may speak of the speed of a phenomenon, but not of the speed of time. Time is a human concept and as such it is absolutely objective and has to remain so, like any measurement invented by human beings. Then he speaks a lot about the subjective impression we have according to various psychological states we may be in. That implies that we feel a certain amount of time as having a short or long duration but duration is not time. A star does not know time, nor duration as for that, but for two different reasons, because time is a human invention and because a star has no consciousness or awareness of duration, or anything else as for that. Kurzweil when speaking of time or using the concept of time is in fact juggling around with colored balls and he wants us to believe he is not a juggler but the balls and their dancing in the air are objective descriptions of the Universe.If he had been prudent with time he would have been realistic with scientific and technological what’s more models. All our knowledge is nothing but a complex set of models built by our mind on the basis of our sensations transformed into perceptions in our brain by our mind.But Kurzweil never discusses the concept of mind and hardly refers to it. He refers to the brain which would in a way or another contain our intelligence and our knowledge. He uses most of the time a computing metaphor and the brain is a hard disk and intelligence is the software or the programming, knowledge being the memory or the data bank of the hard disk. That metaphor is primitive and it is a shortcut if not a mental short circuit.What is the mind? The mind is a construct of man’s brain built from all the individual has accumulated as for sensations, transformed into perceptions and articulated one on top, or whatever, of the other into a complex architecture from the very first moment of conception. The Pro-life or Pro-abortion debate has no value here. The fetus starts feeling and accumulating things, sensations, as soon as it is a fetus, hence just after conception; That fetus will have a heart of its own around the fourth week and from one beating (its mother’s heart) it will shift to two beatings (his mother’s and his own hearts) and these two will coordinate from one moment to the next and the fetus experiences from the first day and then from the fourth week the beating of one heart and then of two and the coordination of both. Stress in the mother, pleasure in the mother, fear in the mother change the beating of her heart and the fetus knows it. We mustn’t forget that the fetus will eventually develop mirror neurons that will multiply the empathy he is living from the very first day. All that is ignored by Kurzweil.Worse even he ignores that the child from the twentieth or twenty-fourth week of gestation will be able to clearly hear all that the mother says and all that is said within one yard and a half around the mother, and by the way not only said but all noises or music or whatever sound. Before that audition the fetus could feel the vibrations of the mother’s body while she was speaking. Now he can hear the very clusters of sounds she produces, and those are associated to the vibrations, and those that are produced in her direction. At birth the new-born will be able to react to the clusters of sounds that had been common with the mother and experiments were done with the names of the siblings of the new-born and the baby reacted to these clusters one hour after birth. All that is ignored and of course language is ignored in its hierarchical articulated nature.But there is more. The birth itself is never taken into account and the trauma it brings with discontinuous feeding, with breathing, with hunger and thirst, and the first cry of the baby. It will not take the baby very long to understand that when it cries some adult is going to come to take care of its needs, wants, discomforts and desires. That creates a basic MATRIX of hierarchized functions centering on a relation. The functions are theme and location, source and goal, agent and theme. These functions are the basic functions of any human syntax and the relations, static (of the “be” type or of the “have” type) or active (of the transitive, intransitive, transferring or positioning types, not to speak of the particular transfers of “give” and “take”). All that is learned from experience by the new-born child and built in his mind as a model that will inform the language when words become possible.Yes the child listens and yes the child will babble and discover that the lip movements of sucking or rejecting the tit of his mother or the bottle-tit can be articulated on the flow of air coming from his larynx and when that larynx starts lowering the child will be able to pronounce “ma”, “pa”, “da”, “ta”, “ka”. As soon as the larynx is low enough to control the flow of air and as soon as the articulatory power of the mouth, jaws, tongue, glottis becomes more developed the child will be able to produce and articulate more sounds, and he will start associating the clusters of sound with the referential elements around him, on the basis of and into the basic MATRIX he will have by then vastly developed in his mind through and from experience.But the main mistake of Kurzweil is methodological. He does not seems to understand, actually he can’t, that the mind being a construct will change its construction constantly every single time a new element of knowledge appears. That connection between the knowledge and the architecture of the mind is not seen by Kurzweil and the evolutionary nature of that relation is not seen either, especially not in its dual carriageway dialectic: a given state of the mind enables a child to learn a certain item of knowledge but that item of knowledge reacting on the mind changes it and restructures it and then the mind is able to learn some new item of knowledge he could not learn before. And that process is never finished, except with death, that can be mental before being physical, but that’s not the point here.So the main methodological defect appears then.He states what he calls laws, particularly the Law of Accelerating Returns. But he does not seem to know this law is a mental model constructed by his mind of what might be a natural phenomenon. But his law contains a very old defect generally identified as the paradox of Ulysses and the Hare. If Man’s mental development is slower than the machine’s development then sooner or later the machine will step beyond man. But he forgets the basic principle of man’s development. It is mental, hence in the mind, hence a construct, a model, hence every step of it develops the mind itself and every development of what this mind produces develops the mind itself, which means we cannot in anyway consider the mind (and Kurzweil only considers the brain) as in anyway static in power and extension. The brain is hardly overused by the mind. Isn’t it said that Einstein used something like 12 or 13 % of his brain? The brain is far from being fully used and the mind has quite a lot of brain reserve to develop more and more models of reality.The last point I would like to make here is the social hierarchy that is behind that thinking.At the top you have “the software-based humans who vastly exceed those still using native neuron-cell-based computation.” No matter how vast this class is, it is a dominant class. We are in pure science fiction where these superior beings are purely virtual living in virtual bodies in a virtual reality and that they can eventually descend into a nano-engineered physical body. That reminds me of Hubbard’s “theta” and “MEST”The population this superior class dominates is to be seen as composed of several layers.First the middle human class that uses “neural implant technology to reach an enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities.” Note the mind is still absent since, according to Bertrand Russell, the body and its senses can only increase the quality of the sensations, and it is the mind that will build the perceptions. That’s the short cut of the presentation which is a short circuit: without a mind the way I defined it, along with Bertrand Russell and all cognitive linguists, we blow the system because the mind is the fuse of it.At the bottom the lower class is composed of the humans who do not utilize the afore-mentioned implants and are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who are using them.This society is an echo of Brave New World and it amounts to real apartheid based not on race, not even on culture and education, but on the use or not of neural implant technology. There is not choice whatsoever in this social vision. Under the virtual dominant class that may condescend to get into a nano-engineered physical body to deal with real humans, the choice, if it is a choice, is to accept neural implants or not. On one hand you can participate in the society. On the other hand you cannot and I guess you will be sent to some reservation if not a simple extermination plant. And this does not answer the question of who will decide and through what procedure, and with what appeal route, that this physical body will be entrusted to the virtual dominant individuals to be able to intervene in the real world. Who will decide who is going to be the vessel of these virtual dominant beings? We are this time in Supernatural. So we can ask who is Lucifer and who is Michael.To conclude, and I will spend a lot more time to discuss Kurzweil’s books (all of them) in another arena, this ideology justifies deistic visions without hardly referring to God. This ideology is socially segregative. This ideology negates the developmental role of the mind by negating the mind itself. This ideology does not understand the developmental role of language among humans. This ideology ignores all the research done on pre-natal existence and cognitive process, procedures and power.And surprisingly enough some of its conclusions are extremely close to Hubbard’s, particularly in the science-fiction of it. Hubbard was more on retrospective science fiction, inheritance from the very distant past. Kurzweil is more on a prospective science fiction, the production of a future that will transcend us. But both base their visions of man and human society on a selection according to some kind of science-fictional elaboration that takes the form of some pseudo-psychiatric form in Hubbard, and that last “elaboration” word is an understatement.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

⭐Product received thanks

Keywords

Free Download The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence in PDF format
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence PDF Free Download
Download The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence 2025 PDF Free
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence 2025 PDF Free Download
Download The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence PDF
Free Download Ebook The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence