Having been extremely intrigued after the discussion at CTO Breakfast on Friday I picked up a copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to read this weekend but what I’ve read so far is fascinating and I’m seeing several things I want to blog about.
First of all though, I want to say that I don’t necessarily agree with everything I’m reading, and I am not proclaiming to believe all Ray’s hypothesis. What I see this book as is a very carefully thought out/laid out theory based on observations and comprehension. Ray is in some ways attempting to predict the future in this book – based on extrapolation of Moore’s Law and several other factors he is assigning years he expects to see bookmark technological breakthroughs. Clearly there are more factors involved that can de-rail some of his estimates. I’m not going to discredit him (as I’ve seen some do) based on missing year estimates. I think that what he is laying out is based on sound anlysis and pattern recognition, therefore pattern disrupting factors are going to occur.
So, I’m going to give The Singularity its own category on my blog and I’ll post things I find relating to some of the theories in the book and my thoughts about the book in that category.
