The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible, and not necessarily best read from front to back--it's less heavily historical if you jump around (Kurzweil encourages this). Much of the content of the book lays the groundwork to justify Kurzweil's timeline, providing an engaging primer on the philosophical and technological ideas behind the study of consciousness. 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." --Therese Littleton

Customer Reviews Average rating - 4.0

Rating - 4 Date: 2008-08-15
Content: Ray Kurzweil has written a great book, but the title is very misleading. Mr. Kurzweil, as far as I can tell, is very much a humanistic/mechanistic person, not believing much in the spiritual as defined by traditional orthodox religion. Nevertheless, this book on the rise of artificial intelligence (what I would call the age of thinking machines) and our likely symbiotic relationship with them in the near future, is very thought-provoking, and makes for compelling reading.

The author makes a very good case that humans will inevitably merge with computers and machines to form a type of human-machine hybrid that is still human, but "enhanced" with neural implants to think faster and better, and replacement body parts (either biological or mechanical) that will allow us by the year 2040 to live easily to 120 or 150 years of age. After that, it gets even stranger, as humans will probably choose to abandon their bodies to be "down-loaded" into cyborg-android artificial bodies, or just live as pure thought without a physical presence in virtual reality. (A non-physical being could control nano-foglet particles to form a physical presence if required.) Brave new world indeed.

I have no idea if any of Kurzweil's predictions will come true, but he has a good track record. I highly recommend reading this book, then follow it up with the sequel titled "The Singularity Is Near" (an even better book than this one, although both are terrific).
Summary: Should be called The Age of Thinking Machines

Rating - 1 Date: 2008-06-20
Content: This guy spends a lot of time (not all though) cooking up sci-fi thingie and proclaiming them as the future. Artificial Intelligence researchers in the 1950's and 1960's proclaimed all fancy and wonderful things about Artificial Intelligence (like he does) and extremely few panned out in the 1970's. This resulted in gravely reduced funding (especially in England) for the field and hurt it in the public's eye. The field recovered in the 1980's but researchers are now more realistic and under-promise and over-deliever. This Ray Kurzweil is just cruising for a bruising by repeating the mistakes of the 1960's and 1970's. Interestingly, he should know the mistakes better than most of us for he was in the field back then as he is in it now.
Summary: Some please give Ray Kurzweil a medal for earning a living day-dreaming

Rating - 3 Date: 2007-11-23
Content: It's a very chaotic collection of thoughts that didn't provide any true insight to me. Compared to "The Singularity Is Near" anyway. (Or maybe it was excactly because I had read it before). The essential subjects, like exponential trends, virtual reality and chaos, get thrown around a lot, but that's it really.

In retrospect was definitely written in a very formative stage of Kurzweil's thought. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Ray Kurzweil fanboy, but we have better things available now in 2007. I'd recommend skipping it and going straight for The Singularity Is Near. Or, to some other newer book for that matter if you're reading this from the even more distant future, where these subjects finally get the serious attention that they deserve...

The best part I thought was the chapter called 2009.

By 2009 there would finally be wearable computers. We'd also mainly do the hardcore work with lighter than ~1 pound portable computers that come in various shapes and sizes. We'd have "body lans" of about ten different computers around our bodies at all times. Majority of text is created with speech recognition. Mostly no keyboards. Displays with the quality of paper. Instead of speakers, some small devices that can create "audible three frequency sounds from the spectrum created by the interaction of very high frequency tones". Learning has been efficiently computerized. Translating telephone technique with live speech translation. Disabilities are levelable with technology. Computer-collaborated art and music. Awesome electronic music controllers. (We have, what, the Wiimote?) Grammar checkers are actually useful. Cancer mostly eliminated. And most of all, THERE IS INTEREST IN THIS KIND OF PHILOSOPHY.
Summary: Formative and messy

Rating - 3 Date: 2007-11-19
Content: In this volume, Ray Kurzweil offers a frighteningly detached blueprint for a digital future. (A better subject for this book might have been, "The age of dispirited humans: when humans cede intelligence to machines.") Before I launch into the following disquisition, I should note that the author is engaging, speaks clearly, and tells a good tale. Which makes it scarier still. Perhaps the undercurrent of virtual sexuality presented in SPIRITUAL MACHINES best embodies (or should I say "disembodies"?) the author's total disconnect from what I consider human and humane. He sees the present flood of sexual matter on the web as a pale harbinger of the future of virtual sex - a coming era when sexual experience with our computers will first be indistinguisable from physical relations, and then much better. He suggests that even when we are in the same room with someone with whom we wish to engage sexually we will opt for climbing into our units to get it on in cyberspace. (That is, while there are still rooms, and bodies - a condition he confidently predicts will end by the 22nd century.) He notes that there will be no STDs, no physcial awkwardnesses, hey, not even constrictions on body shapes, appendages, orifices, whatever...) And we will do it forever. The words "natural life span" will no longer have meaning. Looks like hell to me.
Summary: Hell is where you find it

Rating - 5 Date: 2007-05-15
Content: Since I get into contact with the Vinge's singularity concept I developed a very great attraction for the matter.
Ray Kurzweil explains it in a easy, not alarming and optimistic way.
After reading The Age of Spiritual Machines and his later book the Singularity is near I can not understand how somebody can live without knowing about this potential threat and at the same time potential solution to mankind problems.
Summary: A Book that everybody should read.