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. In 1990, Raymond Kurzweil described in his book The Age of Intelligent Machines how computers would come to be able to recognize human speech, spinning predictions that came true in less than a decade. This year, the pioneering inventor has released a bold new volume that projects his beliefs about machine intelligence deep into the next century, to envision a time when computers evolve far beyond the abilities of humans. These bizarre predictions would be all too easy too shrug off as sheer science fiction, were it not for Kurzweil’s credentials. A pioneer in music, speech recognition and text-to-speech educational software, Kurzweil was named Inventor of the Year a decade ago, in 1988, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1994 Kurzweil was awarded Carnegie Mellon’s top science award, the Dickson Prize, and he won the Association of the American Publishers’ award for the most outstanding computer-science book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, in 1990. Kurzweil has been a busy man. He founded and sold off three companies that bear his name… He developed the first omni-font optical character-recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed image scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first computer music keyboard capable of reproducing orchestral instruments and the first large-vocabulary speech-recognition system.
Kurzweil graduated from MIT, but has since received nine honorary doctorates in science, engineering, music and humane letters from leading colleges and universities worldwide. ‘People are already starting to get neural implants to cure disabilities, but eventually neural implants will be able to enhance our perceptions, our memory, our logical abilities and an endless spiral of higher-order abilities unimaginable today,’ says Kurzweil.” 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. The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible… 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.’
A Note to the Reader: As a photon wends its way through an arrangement of glass panes and mirrors, its path remains ambiguous. It essentially takes every possible path available to it (apparently these photons have not read Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”).This ambiguity remains until observation by a conscious observer forces the particle to decide which path it had taken. Then the uncertainty is resolved — retroactively — and it is as if the selected path had been taken all along. Like these quantum particles, you — the reader — have choices to make in your path through this book. You can read the chapters as I intended them to be read, in sequential order. Or, after reading the Prologue, you may decide that the future can’t wait, and you wish to immediately jump to the chapters in Part III on the twenty-first century (the table of contents on the next pages offers a description of each chapter). You may then make your way back to the earlier chapters that describe the nature and origin of the trends and forces that will manifest themselves in this coming century. Or, perhaps, your course will remain ambiguous until the end. But when you come to the Epilogue, any remaining ambiguity will be resolved, and it will be as if you had always intended to read the book in the order that you selected. – Copyright © Ray Kurzweil.