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From: 
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 10:35:10 EST
Subject: Kurzweil's book

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil has written THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL
MACHINES, subtitled WHEN COMPUTERS EXCEED HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Viking,
1999. The book jacket does not mention any academic degrees or positions,
but cites many technical achievements, with nine honorary doctorates.  

So far I have not read all of it  thoroughly, so cannot guarantee that
what follows does justice to the book as a whole, but I am reasonably
confident that my comments are appropriate.  

The writing is entertaining, lively and often witty. One of his quotes is
from Woody Allen: "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?
In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."  

Another, if I remember correctly, goes something like this: "An ultimately
small piece of negative charge is an electron. An ultimately small piece
of positive charge is a proton. And an ultimately small piece of toast is
a crouton."  

The decibel level is high, and may succeed in raising consciousness about
the probable wrenching changes coming soon. It helps that the author has
been personally responsible for some of the recent advances in computer
technology, and is not just a journalist or science writer.  

On the other hand, there often seems to be considerable over-confidence,
lack of reserve, and failure to mention competing ideas--and in at least
one case, just plain ignorance. Examples:  

1. Cryonics is mentioned only very briefly, in two places, and the author
seems to be misinformed or at least careless. He mentions Drexler's
ENGINES OF CREATION and then says, "The book actually inspired the
cryonics movement of the 1980s, in which people had their heads (with or
without bodies) frozen in the hope that a future time would possess the
molecule-scale technology to overcome their mortal diseases, as well as
undo the effects of freezing and defrosting. Whether a future generation
would be motivated to revive all these frozen brains was another matter." 


2. In several places--including the very first page of the book, an
unnumbered page headed "A Note to the Reader"--he signs on to the notion,
associated with the name of Wigner and others, that a conscious observer
is necessary for an "observation" to make a quantum event definite, and
this fixation happens retroactively. (If nobody ever looked at the
photographic plate, there would be no mark on it. If humans had not
evolved, our universe would never have existed; our perceptions, acting
backward in time, materialized the whole thing.) He doesn't say this is
just one school of thought, but presents it as fact.  

Indeed, the whole question of interpretation of quantum theory, and
especially of the "reduction of the wave function" (realization of a
measurement out of a range of prior probabilities) is much, much more
complex, and much less agreed upon by specialists in the field, than most
people imagine. Among many other collections and reviews, see e.g. QUANTUM
CONCEPTS IN SPACE AND TIME, ed. Penrose & Isham, Oxford U. Press, 1985, as
well as more recent works.  

(When I was in college, I asked the professor teaching a quantum course
why every wave function was not immediately collapsed, since presumably
every particle at every moment is having gravitational interactions with
every other particle--and also with every macroscopic object such as a
star--even if delayed. He had no answer for this or for several other
questions, but in the above mentioned book Penrose suggests that
"reduction will occur when the decrease in entropy involved in the
reduction effect is at least compensated by a corresponding increase in
the gravitational entropy." Tough stuff.)  

3. "Whereas Newton had described a world of clockwork perfection….the laws
of thermodynamics describe a world of chaos…unpredictable…movement of
particles." Actually, the laws of thermodynamics are not inconsistent with
classical mechanics, and in fact classical statistical mechanics was
derived from classical mechanics.  

4. "Free will is purposeful behavior and decision making." Very, very
careless writing.  

I could go on, but will now change instead to examples of appropriate
reserve, even if not of adequate analysis:  

1. "..if a machine passes a Turing Test, I believe that we will believe
that it is conscious." He does not, in anything I have read, claim that
the Turing Test is definitive in any way.  

2. He gives a series of thought experiments with which we are all
familiar--replacing brain parts quickly or slowly etc., but makes no
explicit claim that they prove anything. In fact, he concludes the section
by noting that "Old Jack" (the person who has been scanned and uploaded
and is about to be extinguished) "may suddenly realize that the 'identity
from pattern' argument is flawed."  

Nevertheless, despite this explicit caution, the thrust of the book seems
to be that we are indeed destined to uploading.  

In fact, in the course of writing this and doing further quick reading, I
have now tentatively concluded that the book, after all, has very little
that is new or significant. In short, it is basically a pot-boiler,
although above average of the genre and with some nice nuggets of
information. Its main thrust is almost boring by now--that technological
progress is exponentially upward--but again, very few people, even among
technogeeks, truly take this to heart or allow its implications to
influence their lives or careers.  

Robert Ettinger Cryonics Institute Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org  

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