The ability to control and to reprogram our feelings will become even more profound in the late twenty-first century when technology moves beyond mere neural implants and we fully install our thinking processes into a new computational medium-that is, when we become software. -The Age of Spiritual Machines

     Ray Kurzweil fully believes that the human purpose in evolution was to invent computers so that they can become the next step in our evolutionary process. The thing is, he expects that to happen in his lifetime, and he is a young 54 years old. He, as you will clearly see from reading this review, is not a Christian. He is an AI expert and a futurist, and both of these ideas underlie the book. What is particularly scary is that he is a fairly good futurist, in that many of his predictions of the future of technology have been quite accurate.

     He begins his description of our journey into the not-so-distant future by developing the Law of Accelerating Returns. This law states that: "As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes)". This can be derived from the Law of Time and Chaos, which says as chaos increases, so does time between salient events. Keeping in mind that a salient event could be defined as a jump in our evolution. He then argues that while we know that entropy increases in a closed system, that evolution is not a closed system, that is, evolution has some inherent intelligence (or evolutionary computer algorithms wouldn't work), so therefore the Law of Accelerating Returns does not violate one of the fundamental laws of the universe, the Law of Increasing Entropy. He then argues that the Law of Accelerating Returns manifests itself in Moore's Law. He claims we can also see it in the rapid development of technology since the Industrial Revolution.

     To move us along to the point where computers inherit the Earth, Kurzweil discusses several key ideas by looking at their history. He talks about the beginnings of AI and how the Turing Test was developed. He discusses the broad topic of intelligence, and then shows how in the past we tried various strategies to make machines intelligent. He firmly believes that neural nets that mimic the structure of the human brain will be the vehicle for our leap into the age of intelligent computers. For after all what is the difference between a perfect computer copy of the human brain, and the human brain itself. He shoots for a little while off into the fascinating (though exceedingly confusing) area of quantum computing, but then jumps right back into his discussion of knowledge and intelligence. He conjectures, that from the progress we are making on brain scanning and the application of the law of acc elerating returns, that we will be able to copy ourselves into our new electronic brains. Boy does that create some hairy issues, but I will leave what those our as one of the many prizes gained from reading this book. Actually I will mention one, but that will be a tad later.

     Moving briskly along, Kurzweil goes into one of the key topics in his book, and that is, that a human is not complete without a body. Much of our natural language has developed around our bodies. Notice that sentence, "around" for example, is a word that we use all the time that comes from the idea of special locality, which is one of the key properties of a body. He predicts that by twenty years from now we will have one or two virtual bodies that we actually use to interact with people on a daily basis (just look at the popular game Everquest). By 2099 we will command Utility Fog, or teams of nanobots that form a body when and where you like, though he believes that you won't even need that anymore. Regardless though, the idea of having a body is important, just because the body is a virtual one, doesn't really matter. After all, if everyone has only a virtual body, what does it mean to have a real body? Your real body is your virtual body. I can begin to argue that with the moral conundrum I promised earlier. Take poor Jim; he is a farmer, who uses a combine at some time in the not to distant future. Unfortunately for Jim, he is very clumsy. First he loses a leg in his trusty combine, and lets assume that in the future we understand better how our neural system works, and we are able to replace his leg with an electronic one that works exactly like his old one. Now, no one would argue that Jim is not Jim any more. After all, today people have fake legs and arms, and we assume them to be the same person they always were. What if he were to lose his other leg, and his two arms. I would argue that he was still Jim. Now he gets his trunk sucked in to this combine, up to his neck, and then we replace all his organs with electronic ones so that all that is real flesh (though he still has a body that is similar to everyone else) is his head. Is Jim still the same person? Well he certainly claims to be, and I argue that he is; this is how Kurzweil begins his argument of how a computer can be real, and how we don't need "real" bodies to exist.

     The rest of Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines is a fanciful journey into the future, all the way up until the end of time, using real predictions he is making for the power of computers. He uses an interesting literary tool, where he embodies the reader as a character in his book and discusses key topics and predictions with her (as it happens he chooses Molly as the fictional reader) as a means of helping people understand his predictions. The scary thing is, he made many predictions in another book in the late eighties, and he has been right on with many of those.

     This brings me to Kurzweil's credentials. He has only a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Literature from MIT; his industrial credentials are quite impressive. He has developed many leading edge products that utilize concepts of AI, for example he invented the first reading machine for the deaf. He has formed a handful of companies, sits on the board of many more, has nine honorary degrees, and has been honored by two presidents-and those are just a few of his accomplishments. One thing about Kurzweil that you probably could have guessed by now even if you missed me telling you is that he is by no means a Christian. As you can see from what he believe the purpose of the human race is, he takes no account of God.

     While his subject may seem futuristic, he believes it to be our near future, and I fear his predictions. Even if his timeline is off by twice what he predicts, everyone reading this will see the time when we cast off our human bodies and live solely inside of a computer. I personally hope I never see this, and I fervently hope that these predictions are wrong. After all, as a Christian I have trouble rectifying these predictions with my worldview, though that has been the case for many people in the past, but God always prevails. On a different note though, I do believe that not only every student in Computers and Society, but every student at Gordon should read this book. I feel that it will open up a healthy discussion about many of the underlying principles of integrating computers in to our lives, for after all, computer technology will continue to grow and invade our lives until the day we are taken Home.