Forty Five. The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
1999, Penguin Books, 400 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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The problem with future-predicting books, especially technology oriented future-predicting books, is that they don’t age well. They are really set to fail — if the range of prediction is too narrow, it becomes uninteresting very quickly — predict ten years into the future and those ten years fly by, and everybody can see if your predictions had any merit; if the range is too wide, anything can happen within a span of, say, one hundred years, and your meticulously planned argument basing a set of predictions on a set of vectors moving in pre-determined directions falls into pieces.
Ray Kurzweil has decided to take on both of these approaches. A man of immense intelligence and a wide variety of interests, his track record (which he sprinkles generously on the pages of this book) is enough for him to be able to dabble in futurism without really risking any of his reputation — after all, he has plenty to fall back on should this particular aspect of his career fall short. In 1989, he has released the seminal book, The Age of Thinking Machines, in which he has brought closer to the general public the definition of artificial intelligence, and the ways in which it can impact our lives in the near, and far, future. He has predicted several things in that book, and many of them came true. Hence a portion of intellectual acumen fell into his lap as a person who knows what he’s talking about when he’s talking about the future. Given that some of the things he has predicted have not come true, or at least not in the exact manner he had predicted, Kurzweil knows that trying to make another set of predictions, for another similar time period, would not be beneficial — readers will be able to tell, too quickly, whether he was right or not. But spreading his predictions in manageable ranges of time that eventually reach a time period in which none of his readers (except the people who follow the same nutritional regimen that he does, apparently) will be alive, is safer. Therefore he released a second book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, ten years later.
Kurzweil dedicates a large portion of the book — almost half, to a very lengthy and very useful explanation of what brought us here — how we came to be the species that evolves technology and has technology help us evolve, why is it important, and what we can, and should, do about it. Then he sets off to talk for the rest of the book — some of it ordered as a set of predictions for particular time periods, and some of it as a more generic discussion — about some aspects of the coming singularity, and humankind’s inability (and lack of desire, probably) to distinguish themselves from the machines that help them become better humans — what happens to the spirit, when everything becomes a set of ones and zeros (or sets of all of them at once, if we take the quantum path of computing)? What happens to art, to religion, to philosophy? Do we transcend? What do we transcend into? How would we know? Would we still consider ourselves human when we don’t really need our physical bodies? Would we have a limit to what we can do, feel, know? Some of these questions are answered in the book, some are not. But as the nature of this type of questions dictates, the ones answered raise even more questions.
The part of the book that we mere humans are more drawn to, naturally, is the prediction part. We want to know what the future is going to be like. We want to prepare. Putting aside Kurzweil’s strange manner of organising the book (almost each chapter is an essay followed by a conversation with an imaginary reader who happens to be alive throughout every time period that Kurzweil talks about), its division into chapters dealing with specific years, as symbols of the time period they are part of — the last year of a decade or the last year before another decade, starting in the year this book has been written in — becomes problematic when the reader is positioned where I am. See, I am in the future, relative to this book. And as the chapters progressed across the arrow of time, I’ve been impressed by how accurate Kurzweil’s prediction have been for 2009, but then I’ve reached 2019, and none of his predictions hit. I think the main problem in Kurzweil’s set of predictions, is that he did not take into account other aspects of our human existence that may affect the advance of technology — such as the terrorist attacks on September 11th that reshaped the United States’ bellicose foreign policy for another decade, or the colossal financial recession that followed later that decade. He did not take into account the simple fact that people may not take to some of the aspects of technology that he describes — the crash and burn of Google Glass as a product, for example, comes to mind. And so, it looks like his predictions for 2009 still hold pretty much true for today, and that maybe in ten years, every one of his predictions for 2019 would have been correct, and we are just in a ten years’ delay of where Kurzweil wants us to be. I’ll return to this book in ten years to verify. And maybe I should also start following Kurzweil’s nutritional regimen in order to live to be over one hundred years old — I might be able to revisit the book to see if he was right about 2099 as well.
