Geoff Holden

I recently finished reading ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’ by Ray Kurzweil. I had been meaning to read it (or really any of his books) for a while, and after I saw him give a public lecture at Stanford back in mid-May, I ordered the book.

It was an interesting read, and nobody’s ever going to claim that the man doesn’t have some wacky ideas. But he also has a really impressive track record for technology predictions, one can already see some of the predictions he made in this book coming true (it was first published in ’99).

He starts off by explaining the law of accelerating returns, which is the same way the Stanford talk started. Essentially he says that the rate of paradigm changes in technology (and human evolution, which he sees technology as an extension of) is increasing at an exponential rate. Wikipedia covers this pretty well, so I won’t bother to repeat it all here (plus they have the graphs).

I like the style he used whereby at the end of all of his chapters, there’s a “conversation” between him and somebody else who’s reading along. It serves the purpose of answering common questions and clarifying things. Near the end of the book, when he starts making predictions, the conversations take place across time, ie. to this person living 10 or 20 years in the future. As a side-note, I liked Orson Scott Card’s use of a similar technique in the Ender’s Game series.

Now, the downside–I found it to be a really slow read, I wasn’t really motivated to pick it up night after night, and rarely did I push to read more than a single chapter at a time (I usually didn’t finish a single chapter in a sitting). In it’s defense, the first part of the book is really information-heavy; not quite to the level of a text book, but getting pretty close. The exception to this is near the end where it really picks up and gets faster and more engaging when he starts making more predictions and the conversations mentioned above take up larger portions of the chapters.

So, do I recommend that you go out and read this book? I’m going to go with a non-committal ‘maybe’. For anybody interested in things like AI, nanotechnology, etc. I’d suggest reading it. That being said, hearing him in person was better, but I’d like to hear him debate a lot of these things with somebody more pessimistic.