Kurzweil predicts machines with human-level intelligence will be available from affordable computing devices within a couple of decades, revolutionizing most aspects of life. He says nanotechnology will augment our bodies and cure cancer even as humans connect to computers via direct neural interfaces or live full-time in virtual reality. Kurzweil predicts the machines "will appear to have their own free will" and even "spiritual experiences".[1] He says humans will essentially live forever as humanity and its machinery become one and the same. He predicts that intelligence will expand outward from Earth until it grows powerful enough to influence the fate of the universe.
Reviewers appreciated Kurzweil's track record with predictions, his ability to extrapolatetechnology trends, and his clear explanations. However, there was disagreement on whether computers will one day be conscious. Philosophers John Searle and Colin McGinn insist that computation alone cannot possibly create a conscious machine. Searle deploys a variant of his well-known Chinese room argument, this time tailored to computers playing chess, a topic Kurzweil covers. Searle writes that computers can only manipulate symbols which are meaningless to them, an assertion which if true subverts much of the vision of the book.
Background
Ray Kurzweil in 2006
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and serial entrepreneur. When The Age of Spiritual Machines was published he had already started four companies: Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. which created optical character recognition and image scanning technology to assist the blind, Kurzweil Music Systems, which developed music synthesizers with high quality emulation of real instruments, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, which created speech recognition technology, and Kurzweil Educational Systems, which made print-to-speech reading technology.[2] Critics say predictions from his previous book The Age of Intelligent Machines "have largely come true"[3] and "anticipated with uncanny accuracy most of the key computer developments"[4] of the 1990s. After this book was published he went on to expand upon its ideas in a follow-on book The Singularity is Near. Today Ray Kurzweil works at Google where he is attempting to "create a truly useful AI [artificial intelligence] that will make all of us smarter".[5]
Content
Law of accelerating returns
Kurzweil opens by explaining that the frequency of universe-wide events has been slowing down since the Big Bang while evolution has been reaching important milestones at an ever-increasing pace. This is not a paradox, he writes, entropy (disorder) is increasing overall, but local pockets of increasing order are flourishing. Kurzweil explains how biological evolution leads to technology which leads to computation which leads to Moore's law.[6]
Kurzweil unveils several laws of his own related to this progression, leading up to his law of accelerating returns which says time speeds up as order increases.[7] He believes Moore's law will end "by the year 2020" but that the law of accelerating returns mandates progress will continue to accelerate, therefore some replacement technology will be discovered or perfected to carry on the exponential growth.[8]
Time periods between key events in human history shrink exponentially in a chart by Kurzweil depicting his law of accelerating returns.
As in The Age of Intelligent Machines Kurzweil argues here that evolution has an intelligence quotient just slightly greater than zero. He says it is not higher than that because evolution operates so slowly, and intelligence is a function of time. Kurzweil explains that humans are far more intelligent than evolution, based on what we have created in the last few thousand years, and that in turn our creations will soon be more intelligent than us. The law of accelerating returns predicts this will happen within decades, Kurzweil reveals.[9]
Philosophy of mind
Kurzweil introduces several thought experiments related to brain implants and brain scanning; he concludes we are not a collection of atoms, instead we are a pattern which can manifest itself in different mediums at different times. He tackles the mystery of how self-awareness and consciousness can arise from mere matter, but without resolution. Based partly on his Unitarian religious education Kurzweil feels "all of these views are correct when viewed together, but insufficient when viewed one at a time" while at the same time admitting this is "contradictory and makes little sense".[10]
Kurzweil defines the spiritual experience as "a feeling of transcending one's everyday physical and mortal bounds to sense a deeper reality".[11] He elaborates that "just being—experiencing, being conscious—is spiritual, and reflects the essence of spirituality". In the future, Kurzweil believes, computers will "claim to be conscious, and thus to be spiritual" and concludes "twenty-first-century machines" will go to church, meditate, and pray to connect with this spirituality.[12]
Artificial intelligence
A simple artificial neural network
Kurzweil says Alan Turing's 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence launched the field of artificial intelligence. He admits that early progress in the field led to wild predictions of future successes which did not materialize. Kurzweil feels intelligence is the "ability to use optimally limited resources" to achieve goals.[13] He contrasts recursive solutions with neural nets, he likes both but specifically mentions how valuable neural nets are since they destroy information during processing, which if done selectively is essential to making sense of real-world data. A neuron either fires or not "reducing the babble of its inputs to a single bit".[14] He also greatly admires genetic algorithms which mimic biological evolution to great effect.
Recursion, neural nets and genetic algorithms are all components of intelligent machines, Kurzweil explains. Beyond algorithms Kurzweil says the machines will also need knowledge. The emergent techniques, neural nets and genetic algorithms, require significant training effort above and beyond creating the initial machinery.[15] While hand-coded knowledge is tedious and brittle acquiring knowledge through language is extremely complex.[16]
Building new brains
Kurzweil shows that computer power is growing exponentially.
To build an artificial brain requires formulas, knowledge and sufficient computational power, explains Kurzweil. He says "by around the year 2020" a $1,000 personal computer will have enough speed and memory to match the human brain, based on the law of accelerating returns and his own estimates of the computational speed and memory capacity of the brain.[17] Kurzweil predicts Moore's law will last until 2020 so current integrated circuits should come close to human brain levels of computation, but he says three dimensional chips will be the next big technology, followed potentially by optical computing, DNA computing, nanotubes, or quantum computing.[18]
Kurzweil feels the best model for an artificial brain is a real human brain, and suggests slicing up and digitizing preserved human brains or examining them non-invasively as technology permits. Kurzweil differentiates between scanning the brain to understand it, in a generic fashion, and scanning a particular person's brain in order to preserve it in exact detail, for "uploading" into a computer for example. The latter is much harder to do, he notes, because it requires capturing much more detail, but it will eventually happen as well. When it does "we will be software, not hardware" and our mortality will become a function of our ability to "make frequent backups".[19]
Building new bodies
Kurzweil notes that many thoughts people have are related to their bodies, and reassures that he does not believe in creating a disembodied brain. He reviews all the various body implants that existed when the book was published, explaining that our bodies are already becoming more synthetic over time. Kurzweil says this trend will continue and that the technology will advance from macroscopic implants, to cellular sized insertions, and finally to nanotechnology.[20]
Molecular-sized gears are an example of nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology has the potential to reshape the entire world, Kurzweil exclaims. Assembling materials molecule by molecule could solve energy problems, cure cancer and other diseases, strengthen our bodies, and produce self-assembling food, clothing, and buildings. Kurzweil admits that nanotechnology carries a big risk; a self-replicating substance, without the constraints of a living organism, might grow out of control and consume everything. However he points out that today there are already technologies which pose grave risks, for example nuclear power or weapons, and we have managed to keep them relatively safe, so he feels we can probably do the same with nanotechnology.[21]
Finally Kurzweil says there is the prospect of virtual bodies, where direct neural implants would give us the sensation of having bodies and a way to exert control, without any physical manifestation at all. Although he quickly brings things back to nanotechnology by pointing out that sufficiently advanced nanotechnology will be like having a virtual world, since "utility fog" will appear to be entirely absent and then instantly morph into functional physical shapes. Kurzweil broaches the topic of sex in futuristic times, reminding us that every new technology "adopts sexual themes". Kurzweil envisions virtual sex, sexbots, and as well as more chaste activities like strolling along a "virtual Cancún beach".[22]
State of the art
Kurzweil explains that in 1999 computers are essential to most facets of life, yet he predicts no major disruption related to the then-pending Y2K problem. He says computers are narrow-minded and brittle so far, but suggests in specific domains they are showing signs of intelligence. As examples Kurzweil cites computer-generated or assisted music, and tools for the automatic or semi-automatic production of literature or poetry. He shows examples of paintings by AARON as programmed by Harold Cohen which can be automatically created. Kurzweil reviews some of his predictions from The Age of Intelligent Machines and various past presentations, and is very pleased with his record. Finally he predicts a new Luddite movement as intelligent machines take away jobs, although he predicts a net gain of new and better jobs.[23]
Kurzweil has a dense chapter of predictions for each of these years: 2009, 2019, 2029, 2099. For example, when discussing the year 2009 he makes many separate predictions related to computer hardware, education, people with disabilities, communication, business and economics, politics and society, the arts, warfare, health and medicine, and philosophy.[24]
As one example he predicts a 2009 computer will be a tablet or smaller sized device with a high quality but somewhat conventional display, while in 2019 computers are "largely invisible" and images are mostly projected directly into the retina, and by 2029 he predicts computers will communicate through direct neural pathways. Similarly in 2009 he says there is interest and speculation about the Turing test, by 2019 there are "prevalent reports" of computers passing the test, but not rigorously, while by 2029 machines "routinely" pass the test, although there is still controversy about how machine and human intelligence compare.[25]
In 2009 he writes it will take a supercomputer to match the power of one human brain, in 2019 $4,000 will accomplish the same thing, while in 2029 $1,000 will buy the equivalent of 1000 humans brains. Dollar figures are in 1999 dollars. Kurzweil predicts life expectancy will rise to "over one hundred" by 2019, to 120 by 2029, and will be indefinitely long by 2099 as humans and computers will have merged.[25]
Molly
The book features a series of sometimes humorous dialogs between an initially unnamed character, later revealed to be a young woman named Molly, and the author. For most of the book she serves as proxy for the reader, asking the author for clarification, challenging him, or otherwise eliciting additional commentary about the current chapter. For example:
So I'll be able to download memories of experiences I've never had? Yes, but someone has probably had the experience. So why not have the ability to share it? I suppose for some experiences, it might be safer to just download the memories. Less time-consuming also. Do you really think that scanning a frozen brain is feasible today? Sure, just stick your head in my freezer here.[26]
Later in the book during the prediction chapters Molly seems to inhabit whatever year the predictions are about, while Kurzweil remains in the present. So Kurzweil starts questioning her about how things are in future, and her lines serve as additional predictions or commentary. For example:
No, I'm talking about real reality now. For example, I can see that Jeremy is two blocks away, headed in this direction. An embedded chip? That's a reasonable guess. But it's not a chip exactly. It's one of the first useful nanotechnology applications. You eat this stuff. Stuff? Yeah, it's a paste, tastes pretty good, actually. It has millions of little computers — we call them trackers — which work their way into your cells.[27]
The rest of the universe
Kurzweil says a universe infused with intelligence may be able to decide its own fate, perhaps avoiding the "big crunch" depicted here.
Kurzweil says life in the universe is "both rare and plentiful" meaning for vast stretches there is nothing then piled into a small space it is everywhere. He suggests any form of life that invents technology will, if it survives, relatively quickly reach the point of merging with that technology, the same thing he predicts will happen to humans. Therefore, Kurzweil explains if we ever met another civilization, we would really be meeting with its technology. The technology would likely be microscopic in size because that is all that would be necessary for exploration. The civilization would not be looking for anything except knowledge, therefore we would likely never notice it.[28]
Kurzweil feels intelligence is the strongest force in the universe, because intelligence can cause sweeping physical changes like defending a planet from an asteroid. Kurzweil predicts that as the "computational density" of the universe increases, intelligence will rival even "big celestial forces". There is disagreement about whether the universe will end in a big crunch or a long slow expansion, Kurzweil says the answer is still up in the air because intelligence will ultimately make the decision.[29]
Reception
Analysis
John Searle believes computers cannot be conscious; he says they can only manipulate meaningless symbols.
Kurzweil uses Deep Blue, the IBM computer that beat the world chess champion in 1997,[30] as an example of fledgling machine intelligence. John Searle, author and professor of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, reviewing The Age of Spiritual Machines in The New York Review of Books, disagrees with Kurzweil's interpretation. Searle argues that while Kasparov was "quite literally, playing chess" the computer in contrast was doing "nothing remotely like it;" instead, it was merely manipulating "a bunch of meaningless symbols".[31]
Searle offers a variant of his Chinese room argument, calling it the Chess Room Argument, where instead of answering questions in Chinese, the man in a room is playing chess. Or rather, as Searle explains, he is inside the room manipulating symbols which are meaningless to him, while his actions result in winning chess games outside the room. Searle concludes that like a computer, the man has no understanding of chess. Searle compares Deep Blue's victory to the manner in which a pocket calculator can beat humans at arithmetic; he adds that it is no more significant than a steel robot which is too tough for human beings to tackle during a game of American football.[31] Kurzweil counters that the very same argument could be made of the human brain, since the individual neurons have no true understanding of the bigger problem the brain is working on but, added together, they produce what is known as consciousness[5].
Searle continues by contrasting simulation of something with "duplication or recreation" of it. Searle points out a computer can simulate digestion, but it will not be able to digest actual pizza. In the same way, he says, computers can simulate the processes of a conscious brain, but that does not mean it is conscious. Searle has no objection to constructing an artificial consciousness producing brain "using some chemistry different from neurons" so long as it duplicates "the actual causal powers of the brain" which he says precludes computation by itself, since that only involves symbol manipulation. Searle concludes by saying the increased computational power that Kurzweil predicts "moves us not one bit closer to creating a conscious machine", instead he says the first step to building conscious machines is to understand how the brain produces consciousness, something we are only in the infancy of doing.[31]
Colin McGinn, an author and philosophy professor at the University of Miami, wrote in The New York Times that machines might eventually exhibit external behavior at a human-level, but it would be impossible to know if they have an "inner subjective experience" as people do. If they do not, then "uploading" someone into a computer is equivalent to letting their mind "evaporate into thin air," he argues. McGinn is skeptical of the Turing test, claiming it smacks of the long-abandoned doctrine of behaviorism, and agreeing with the validity of Searle's "quite devastating" Chinese room argument. He believes minds do compute, but that it does not follow that computation alone can create a mind, instead he says minds have phenomenological properties, perhaps originating from organic tissue. Therefore, he insists that neither silicon chips nor any future technology Kurzweil mentions will ever be conscious.[32]
Reviews
McGinn says The Age of Spiritual Machines is "detailed, thoughtful, clearly explained and attractively written" as well as having "an engaging discussion of the future of virtual sex" and that the book is for "anyone who wonders where human technology is going next".[32] However, Diane Proudfoot, philosophy professor at the University of Canterbury, wrote in Science that Kurzweil's historical details are inaccurate and his philosophical understanding is flawed and that these transgressions inspired "little confidence in his imaginings about the future".[33]
Chet Raymo, physics professor at Stonehill College writes that "Ray Kurzweil has a better record than most at foreseeing the digital future" and "Kurzweil paints a tantalizing — and sometimes terrifying — portrait of a world where the line between humans and machines has become thoroughly blurred". He says the book is a "welcome challenge to beliefs we hold dear" and feels we can only shape the future if we anticipate it first.[4] Jim Bencivenga, staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, says Kurzweil "possesses a highly refined and precise ability to think exponentially about technology over time". Bencivenga also says we should take Kurzweil's predictions very seriously because of his "proven track record".[34] Lyle Feisel, former electrical engineering professor, writes the predictions from Kurzweil's The Age of Intelligent Machines "have largely come true" and so "engineers and computer scientists would do well to give [this book] a read".[3]
In other media
The Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace based their 2000 concept album Spiritual Machines on The Age of Spiritual Machines. They recruited Kurzweil to voice several tracks, on which he read select passages from the book.[35] On October 29, 2021, Our Lady Peace released a sequel album, Spiritual Machines 2, as an NFT that was made available on January 28, 2022, in traditional formats. [36]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines or software, as opposed to the intelligence of humans or other animals. It is a field of study in computer science that develops and studies intelligent machines. Such machines may be called AIs.
The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a "mind", "understanding", or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was presented by philosopher John Searle in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. Similar arguments were presented by Gottfried Leibniz (1714), Anatoly Dneprov (1961), Lawrence Davis (1974) and Ned Block (1978). Searle's version has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of Searle's argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room.
Hugo de Garis is an Australian retired researcher in the sub-field of artificial intelligence (AI) known as evolvable hardware. He became known in the 1990s for his research on the use of genetic algorithms to evolve artificial neural networks using three-dimensional cellular automata inside field programmable gate arrays. He claimed that this approach would enable the creation of what he terms "artificial brains" which would quickly surpass human levels of intelligence.
Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
Mind uploading is a speculative process of whole brain emulation in which a brain scan is used to completely emulate the mental state of the individual in a digital computer. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain and experience having a sentient conscious mind.
Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.
An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of intelligent agent which, if realized, could learn to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings or animals can perform. Alternatively, AGI has been defined as an autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable tasks.Creating AGI is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and of companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic. AGI is a common topic in science fiction and futures studies.
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.
The Age of Intelligent Machines is a non-fiction book about artificial intelligence by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. This was his first book and the Association of American Publishers named it the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990. It was reviewed in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor. The format is a combination of monograph and anthology with contributed essays by artificial intelligence experts such as Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, and Marvin Minsky.
In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change.
An artificial brain is software and hardware with cognitive abilities similar to those of the animal or human brain.
A physical symbol system takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them to produce new expressions.
The history of artificial intelligence (AI) began in antiquity, with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen. The seeds of modern AI were planted by philosophers who attempted to describe the process of human thinking as the mechanical manipulation of symbols. This work culminated in the invention of the programmable digital computer in the 1940s, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning. This device and the ideas behind it inspired a handful of scientists to begin seriously discussing the possibility of building an electronic brain.
The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of computer science that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology, and free will. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It was vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to artificial intelligence:
Hubert Dreyfus was a critic of artificial intelligence research. In a series of papers and books, including Alchemy and AI(1965), What Computers Can't Do and Mind over Machine(1986), he presented a pessimistic assessment of AI's progress and a critique of the philosophical foundations of the field. Dreyfus' objections are discussed in most introductions to the philosophy of artificial intelligence, including Russell & Norvig (2021), a standard AI textbook, and in Fearn (2007), a survey of contemporary philosophy.
Moravec's paradox is the observation in artificial intelligence and robotics that, contrary to traditional assumptions, reasoning requires very little computation, but sensorimotor and perception skills require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is a non-fiction book about brains, both human and artificial, by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. First published in hardcover on November 13, 2012 by Viking Press it became a New York Times Best Seller. It has received attention from The Washington Post, The New York Times and The New Yorker.
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