Apostrophe S

I had a much longer post written, but some fucking spell check plugin I installed ate it all. So forgive me if this sounds rushed. I’m tired.

This book has been on my radar for years. Ever since it came out, really. I guess the book was just hard to find. (Every bookstore has a different opinion of what section it should go in.) Or, if I did find it, I didn’t have the money. Or, if I found it and had the money, I was intimidated by the subject matter, and I convinced myself to opt for the James Bond novel instead. But no more. It is now downloaded to my brain.

Speaking of brains, that’s what Kurzweil spends the first half of the book talking about, before he even gets to the subject of machines that may or may not have spiritual experiences. But I get ahead of myself.

I was originally intimidated by this book, thinking that it would read like PC assembly instructions. It was, after all, written by someone known for his contributions to the field, not his gripping suspense novels. But I was surprised. Kurzweil is an excellent, albiet straightforward, nonfiction writer. And he has imagination and a sense of humor as well. He concludes every chapter with a short Q&A with a “reader,” named Molly, who, through the power of poetic license, is able to communicate with Kurzweil in 1999 even during the chapters in which Kurzweil gradually prognasticates decades into the future. In the early chapters, Molly has a hard time keeping up with what Kurzweil is talking about. But by the end, Kurzweil has a hard time comprehending what life is like for Molly, who in the year 2099 has fully uploaded her mind and soul onto a computer.

I’ll say I learned a lot about our current state of artificial intelligence. (Or rather, 1999’s state.) I knew that Deep Blue had beaten Gary Kasperov in a regular chess tournament, but I had no idea that Kurzweil and other had created “creative” programs that can write and draw original works of art. (Check out Kurzweil’s cyber art site for more info on that, including examples.)

I was a little suspicious of some of Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009. Some of them I just don’t see us accomplishing in 3 years. For one thing, continuous natural speech recognition technology is not nearly far enough along, and especially not ubiquitous enough for us to primarily switch over to that as a means of communicating with our computers. But maybe I’m just being pessimistic.

Overall, I think Kurzweil is a frickin’ genius. He has the ability to see simultaneously where we’ve come from and where we might be going. I’m going to have to pick up his recently released book, The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology. It should be equally as insightful. Man, I just can’t wait for the future to get here.

Next book, The Walking Dead Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye.

[This article is part of the 26 Books project that I'm doing this year.]