The Age of Spiritual Machines

Ray Kurzweil

Dec 1998 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Alan Sklar

About this audiobook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Bold futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, offers a framework for envisioning the future of machine intelligence—“a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next” (The New York Times Book Review).

“Kurzweil offers a thought-provoking analysis of human and artificial intelligence and a unique look at a future in which the capabilities of the computer and the species that invented it grow ever closer.”—BILL GATES
 
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 “restless genius” (The Wall Street Journal), “ultimate thinking machine” (Forbes), and 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 (with human-level capabilities not far behind)
• Relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers
• 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.

Ratings and reviews

Great read (listen), amazing how many of his predictions are spot on 20 years later. Fairly creepy in fact, while listening to this as an audiobook driving - using Android Auto, which is connecting to so much internet knowledge in real-time, extending my capabilites and knowledge as a human. Things are impossible to predict exactly, real timing of things have too many variables, but most of what he's talking about is happening as predicted, and thus all the futuristic concepts seems very feasible.

I listened to this because I had heard that it was a foundational work in the understanding of AI. I absolutely agree, now that I've heard it. It may be decades-old, but if you wish to zoom out and see how AI came to be and where we are likely to go with it as a species, this is required reading. It's all about context. And this book provides it in buckets

About the author

Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for more than six decades—longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a GRAMMY® Award for outstanding achievement in music technology. He is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has written five books including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind, both New York Times bestsellers, and Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.