Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsKurzweil and AI
Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2011
I find this book thoroughly interesting. As a mathematician, I have found many books on the subject of AI lacking in content. This one surprised me. I am at heart disturbed and somewhat reluctant to assent to the idea of making a thinking, feeling machine. This is what so many engineers and scientists purport to be working toward. I feel this attempt is wrongheaded. It is anthropocentric. Why recreate human consciousness in a machine? Why not start the process and allow the machine to become whatever the processes of evolution dictate. It is the age old attempt by man to become God, (w/o sex) in my view. Be that as it may, Kurzweil reverses the notion and predicts not a Brain in Vat idea but that we'll become the intelligent machine by the end of this century. Why make a 2001 Hal, when we can become Hal. One thing is good for sure, all of those moralizing philosophers can shut up with their worries about a Matrix scenario, because we'll be the matrix if Kurzie is right? And I remind you he has before. He predicted speech to text recognition software by 2009 and now every time I check my msgs I get a written transcription (not always correct but pretty good). So, he is not far form right to predict the digitizing of our minds. And I like the idea too! Screw that ill-thought up Turing Test, to see if an AI is a conscious, emoting entity---let's become digital. Now, let's note the irritating flaws to the book.
First, he cow-tows to women by making his chosen gender of reference 'she' and 'her'. Don't know if Kurzie is hen-pecked or just trying to be non-sexist but it made me wanna scream! I can just see his wife saying: Ray now ya did remember to use her instead of he when writing hypothetically right? Yes dear, I did. Look! That's good, because She in the Sky wouldn't like that. Okay, I'm ribbing him, but he should understand English is a masculine language and take he for the general gender. He could've use 'one' but that would have become really esoteric. like poetry, okay minor flaw, but an annoying one.
He seems to believe to make the complex and abstruse topics he covers more amenable to the non-tech audience, he must have a dialog with this fictional Molly (whom is suppose to be us the readers, disaffecting to any male reader), who asks all the dumb laymen (or should I say laywomen) questions. I've rail against this let's-explain-it-to-the-dummies approach in every review I've made of books about scientific topics directed at laymen. Kurzie is no exception. The little dialogue sections began to get me so I skipped them, suggest others do too. I think he was trying to copy Hofstadter's style in his famous Goedel, Escher and Bach opus. Also, he packs a little too much into this work. Those grey sideline stories distract from the subject at hand, though they are interesting. He also, strays afar sometimes without credentials in some discusses. for instance the Big Bang theory and Entropy. A tangent he is not really qualified to discuss, though he has the right to theorize in whatever field he pleases, it only distracts the reader. He did for me I started researching it and stopped reading him for about a week.
But, all in all, this work is fresh and though it's a decade old, it hits the intellectual spot. BTW, you can now check all the predictions he makes in the appendix. He made a lot of them, some for right around now: circa 2010 to 2020.