Approaching The Bionic Age

Indeed, that has already started; daily newspapers recently reported the development of an electronic chip that--acting as a neural sensor of brain activities--enables a totally paralyzed man to control a computer cursor using just his thoughts.

Kurzweil writes, quoting physician Rick Torsch: "We used to treat the brain like soup... [but] now we're treating it like circuitry."

But it remains to be seen if it's possible to endow a machine with human-level intelligence. At this point, any intelligence found in AI programs reflects that of the programmers, not the programs themselves, just as a photograph of a beautiful painting is a copy of beauty, not beauty itself.

It's true that technology has made astounding leaps since the 1950s, and Ray Kurzweil himself was behind many of them: It was often claimed that chess could not be played without some sort of human analysis, for example, or that speech recognition and optical character recognition were high usages of the human mind.

But for every leap we easily find limitations. For example, current voice recognition technology--which allows our spoken words to appear as type on the screen--still requires a cleaner and clearer signal than we humans do. In what is known as the "cocktail party effect," we can isolate a single voice even through the din of surrounding conversations. Current speech-recognition schemes, however, can't distinguish a single voice from the clinking of glasses or the thumping of a bass.

What is unfortunate about this book, other than some factual inconsistencies, is the disappointing lack of follow-through on its most alluring topic: spirituality. Though the title uses the word spiritual, discussion of the topic is meager, leaving the reader hungry for more.

For example, Kurzweil mentions that neuroscientists from the University of California at San Diego have found what they call "God modules," a tiny locus of nerve cells providing us with religious sensitivity. But that's pretty much all we hear about this exciting theory--the one that could hold the key to understanding how our minds respond to spirituality and, ultimately, how we could make a machine feel spiritual.

Kurzweil proposes that "the spiritual experience [appears] to encompass a broad range of mental phenomena.

"Once we have access to the computational processes that give rise to it, we [can then] understand its neurological correlates... [and] capture our intellectual, emotional and spiritual experiences, to call them up at will, and to enhance them."

Readers would like to learn more but we don't even know which questions to ask. We suspect that spirituality requires an extension of conceptual understanding that is very complex intellectually, but we are left without a blueprint as to how machines might acquire such understanding. There is a vast gulf between a computer's cognitive skills, reasoning powers and problem-solving capabilities and those supposedly unique human qualities of common sense, having fun, seeking beauty, knowing right from wrong, and so on.

Are these to be programmed in, or can the computer attain them by itself? How? Are they to be learned by example? From whom or what? This miraculous technology may be developed eventually, but, right now, it's unfair to make claims about the ease of such miracles without having performed at least one of them--which we haven't.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil provides numbers of intellectual predictions and challenges. It hardly matters whether the predictions are going to be proved; rather, accept the challenges, forget the philosophy, and let the ideas and reasoning simmer in your head, which, as you now know, is not just a bowl of soup.

Notable

John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, The Anatomy of Motive (Scribner, 1999). Douglas, a best-selling author and former FBI agent, shows how you can deduce the identity of a killer from the crime. His analyses of Manson, Son of Sam and the Tylenol murderer will keep you turning pages and tossing at night.

Linda E. Savage, Ph.D., Reclaiming Goddess Sexuality: The Power of the Feminine Way (Hay House, 1999). Using a mix of ancient wisdom, modern biology and clinical technique, sex-therapist Savage offers a how-to guide for overcoming various sexual dysfunctions.

J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D., ed., The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives (Academic Press, 1998). Famed forensic psychologist Meloy and colleagues look at unrelenting pursuers including "cyberstalkers": why they do it and how to protect yourself.