|
''The Age of Spiritual Machines'' is a non-fiction book by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil about artificial intelligence and the future course of humanity. First published in hardcover on January 1, 1999 by Viking, it has received attention from ''The New York Times'', ''The New York Review of Books'' and ''The Atlantic''. In the book Kurzweil outlines his vision for how technology will progress during the 21st century. Kurzweil believes evolution provides evidence that humans will one day create machines more intelligent than they are. He presents his law of accelerating returns to explain why "key events" happen more frequently as time marches on. It also explains why the computational capacity of computers is increasing exponentially. Kurzweil writes that this increase is one ingredient in the creation of artificial intelligence, the others are automatic knowledge acquisition and algorithms like recursion, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. Kurzweil predicts machines with human-level intelligence will be available from affordable computing devices within a couple of decades, revolutionizing most aspects of life. He says nanotechnology will augment our bodies and cure cancer even as humans connect to computers via direct neural interfaces or live full-time in virtual reality. Kurzweil predicts the machines "will appear to have their own free will" and even "spiritual experiences". He says humans will essentially live forever as humanity and its machinery become one and the same. He predicts that intelligence will expand outward from earth until it grows powerful enough to influence the fate of the universe. Reviewers appreciated Kurzweil's track record with predictions, his ability to extrapolate technology trends, and his clear explanations. However there was disagreement on whether computers will one day be conscious. Philosophers John Searle and Colin McGinn insist that computation alone cannot possibly create a conscious machine. Searle deploys a variant of his well-known Chinese room argument, this time tailored to computers playing chess, a topic Kurzweil covers. Searle writes that computers can only manipulate symbols which are meaningless to them, an assertion which if true subverts much of the vision of the book. ==Background== Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and serial entrepreneur. When ''The Age of Spiritual Machines'' was published he had already started four companies: Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. which created optical character recognition and image scanning technology to assist the blind, Kurzweil Music Systems, which developed music synthesizers with high quality emulation of real instruments, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, which created speech recognition technology, and Kurzweil Educational Systems, which made print-to-speech reading technology.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.kurzweiltech.com/raybio.html )〕 Critics say predictions from his previous book ''The Age of Intelligent Machines'' "have largely come true"〔 and "anticipated with uncanny accuracy most of the key computer developments"〔 of the 1990s. After this book was published he went on to expand upon its ideas in a follow-on book ''The Singularity is Near''. Today Ray Kurzweil works at Google where he is attempting to "create a truly useful AI (intelligence ) that will make all of us smarter". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Age of Spiritual Machines」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|