Review of The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
In the first chapter of his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, author Ray Kurzweil gives a very brief history of the Universe, which serves as a preface for his subsequent theories. In this history, Kurzweil chronicles the rapid expansion of time between salient events in the history of the Universe, describing time, in his own words, as geometrically slowing (pg. 10). He then jumps headfirst into the history of evolution, and shortly thereafter of technology, in both of which the time between salient events is shrinking exponentially. This leads him to question the opposing nature of the trend (how can time be accelerating as applied to technology and evolution yet decelerating as applied to the very Universe which contains these?) as well as search for similarities between the trends. Thus is created Kurzweil's first theoretical law, that of time and chaos. Kurzweil's Law of Time and Chaos is as follows; "In a process, the time interval between salient
As technology advances, we are able to create more technologically advanced machines, which in turn will enable us to create even more advanced machines, and so on. and the chaos from which an evolutionary process draws its options for further diversity" (pg 35), both of which, Kurzweil claims, are unbounded. events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly alter the future of the process) expands or contracts along with the amount of chaos. Therefore, humans-a creation resulting from the intelligence of evolution-are more intelligent than the intelligence that spawned them. 29) In other words, as things become more chaotic as applied to a specific process it takes longer for significant events to occur within that process, and vice-versa. According to this law, the rate at which we advance technologically has, and will continue to, accelerate exponentially. It is not a difficult comparison which leads Kurzweil to postulate that some day computers, the intelligence that man created, will some day become more intelligent than man himself. If this is the case, and we are to measure intelligence in terms of speed and frequency of error (as we do for an IQ test), then evolution, according to Kurzweil, would rate "only infinitesimally greater than zero" on that same IQ test. Kurzweil cites the example of scientists' ongoing work with DNA, which is on the brink of allowing us to refine and control evolution as the original process never could, as evidence that we have indeed become more intelligent than the process that gave us birth. According to Kurzweil, the only two resources this technological evolution needs to survive are "the growing order of the evolving technology. What if this exponential growth "hits a wall" so to speak, as trends of the exponential variety frequently do? Kurzweil is quick to answer this question, which he knows will be raised quickly by most readers. According to the Law of Accelerating Returns, which states simply that as a process speeds up so do the returns from that process speed up as well, technology will continue to build upon and advance itself.
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