The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
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BlackOxford's review
really liked it
bookshelves: american, epistemology-language, science, sociology, technology Kingdom Come
Those with some theological training might recall Alfred Loisy’s quip about early Christianity: “They expected the coming of the Kingdom; what arrived was the Church.” So with Kurzweil: He expected the emergence of the Spirit; what arrived was FaceBook and Google.* There is a great deal that is theological in the attitudes of those who write about modern technology. Kurzweil puts forth a belief in a sort of pantheistic God of the Universe. If not the Pope, he is certainly a Patriarch of the Church of Electronic Technology and continues to inspire the faithful with his revelatory scriptures.
Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines is a watershed moment in the high-tech movement. It’s a sort of gospel, a prophetic document that has inspired a quasi-religious culture. It is a book with a cosmic perspective, connecting modern technology to the origin and the final destination of the Universe. Technology, according to Kurzweil, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence, not just the existence of members of the species Homo sapiens, but the existence of everything. Without technology the Universe itself would not exist because there would be no knowledge of it.
Apart from this last solipsistic (and presumably jocular) thought, Kurzweil’s argument is both attractive and explanatory. If it misses a few marks about the future, who cares. Prophets are concerned with ultimates not with the details of how we get there. Who knows but he could be right: Facebook and Google could be carriers of the Spirit. After all, Donald Trump is considered by American evangelicals as the anointed instrument of God. The Spirit is reported to blow where it sees fit, so who can have serious doubts - about either FaceBook or Trump.
The central trope which Kurzweil uses to organise his prophecy is that of evolutionary biology. His presumption is very Spinoza-like:**that there is purpose in the Universe. This purpose doesn’t become conscious of itself until the emergence of the first intelligent apes but it has been there all along, from the moment of slight asymmetries in the Big Bang, to the formation of atoms, to the chemical evolution of that signal breakthrough of DNA. From there it was inevitable that life would take control, particularly human life, but also progressing to forms we can only speculate about.
Throughout this evolutionary progression, there is crucial, pre-genetic component, an inherent coding mechanism, which, building progressively on itself, initially generates the laws of physics (including the phenomenon of time), promotes sub-atomic and chemical interactions, leads to the emergence of the complex genome, then explodes into the miracle of human language and of the tools which are the product of language. Every step in this progression is a technological advance, an advance whose pace has been accelerating from the start.
This is stirring stuff. It is no mere boosterism for high-tech; it’s a cultural manifesto as well thought out as the Gospel of John or Marx’s Das Kapital . It provides a myth of origin and an explanation for the way things are that are concise and self-contained in their completeness. The manifesto is also ethically directive. The Universe has purpose, inert matter has purpose, life itself has purpose, and (implicitly) individual human lives are inherently purposeful and should join with the cosmic intentionality.
And that purpose? Kurzweiler is clear about that: “Evolution’s grandest creation—human intelligence—is providing the means for the next stage of evolution, which is technology.” We are manifestly here to make machines. On the face of it, this appears crass and narrow-minded. But keep in mind that Kurzweiler includes language as part of technology, in fact, as information, the foundational component of all technology, even that of atoms and molecules. So his prediction of ‘next stage’ includes not just machines (or not even primarily machines) but the proliferation and self-generation of knowledge. Or to put the matter in terms more compatible with his entire theme: the autonomous existence of language.
In this view of the world, language will come into its own, creating both itself and the machines that propagate it. Presumably language knows that it needs both a source of energy derived from the chaotic entropy which surrounds it, and ‘users’ of language, or at least an audience for itself. The obvious solution of course is to get human beings to pay for the use of the language to which they have become accustomed (addicted?). Hey, presto, Kurzweil got it exactly right. The Spirit he had in mind arrived right on schedule in Facebook and Google. Better than the predictions of Jesus and Paul, therefore. I suppose it all depends on the definition of Spirit in both cases.
* From the Age of Smart Machines (Zuboff 1988), to the Age of Intelligent Machines (Kurzweil 1990), to the Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil 1998), to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2018) in 30 years! The epochs just seem to keep coming, but apparently never the ones that are expected.
** Or perhaps even more aptly resembles the evolutionary theism of the priest-biologist Teilhard de Chardin whose concept of the noösphere, a realm of pure thought that emerges from the biosphere of living things, is the final destination of earthly development. Formulated in the early 20th century, de Chardin’s ideas were of course condemned as heretical by the Church (as were those of his contemporary, Alfred Loisy). See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...
Those with some theological training might recall Alfred Loisy’s quip about early Christianity: “They expected the coming of the Kingdom; what arrived was the Church.” So with Kurzweil: He expected the emergence of the Spirit; what arrived was FaceBook and Google.* There is a great deal that is theological in the attitudes of those who write about modern technology. Kurzweil puts forth a belief in a sort of pantheistic God of the Universe. If not the Pope, he is certainly a Patriarch of the Church of Electronic Technology and continues to inspire the faithful with his revelatory scriptures.
Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines is a watershed moment in the high-tech movement. It’s a sort of gospel, a prophetic document that has inspired a quasi-religious culture. It is a book with a cosmic perspective, connecting modern technology to the origin and the final destination of the Universe. Technology, according to Kurzweil, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence, not just the existence of members of the species Homo sapiens, but the existence of everything. Without technology the Universe itself would not exist because there would be no knowledge of it.
Apart from this last solipsistic (and presumably jocular) thought, Kurzweil’s argument is both attractive and explanatory. If it misses a few marks about the future, who cares. Prophets are concerned with ultimates not with the details of how we get there. Who knows but he could be right: Facebook and Google could be carriers of the Spirit. After all, Donald Trump is considered by American evangelicals as the anointed instrument of God. The Spirit is reported to blow where it sees fit, so who can have serious doubts - about either FaceBook or Trump.
The central trope which Kurzweil uses to organise his prophecy is that of evolutionary biology. His presumption is very Spinoza-like:**that there is purpose in the Universe. This purpose doesn’t become conscious of itself until the emergence of the first intelligent apes but it has been there all along, from the moment of slight asymmetries in the Big Bang, to the formation of atoms, to the chemical evolution of that signal breakthrough of DNA. From there it was inevitable that life would take control, particularly human life, but also progressing to forms we can only speculate about.
Throughout this evolutionary progression, there is crucial, pre-genetic component, an inherent coding mechanism, which, building progressively on itself, initially generates the laws of physics (including the phenomenon of time), promotes sub-atomic and chemical interactions, leads to the emergence of the complex genome, then explodes into the miracle of human language and of the tools which are the product of language. Every step in this progression is a technological advance, an advance whose pace has been accelerating from the start.
This is stirring stuff. It is no mere boosterism for high-tech; it’s a cultural manifesto as well thought out as the Gospel of John or Marx’s Das Kapital . It provides a myth of origin and an explanation for the way things are that are concise and self-contained in their completeness. The manifesto is also ethically directive. The Universe has purpose, inert matter has purpose, life itself has purpose, and (implicitly) individual human lives are inherently purposeful and should join with the cosmic intentionality.
And that purpose? Kurzweiler is clear about that: “Evolution’s grandest creation—human intelligence—is providing the means for the next stage of evolution, which is technology.” We are manifestly here to make machines. On the face of it, this appears crass and narrow-minded. But keep in mind that Kurzweiler includes language as part of technology, in fact, as information, the foundational component of all technology, even that of atoms and molecules. So his prediction of ‘next stage’ includes not just machines (or not even primarily machines) but the proliferation and self-generation of knowledge. Or to put the matter in terms more compatible with his entire theme: the autonomous existence of language.
In this view of the world, language will come into its own, creating both itself and the machines that propagate it. Presumably language knows that it needs both a source of energy derived from the chaotic entropy which surrounds it, and ‘users’ of language, or at least an audience for itself. The obvious solution of course is to get human beings to pay for the use of the language to which they have become accustomed (addicted?). Hey, presto, Kurzweil got it exactly right. The Spirit he had in mind arrived right on schedule in Facebook and Google. Better than the predictions of Jesus and Paul, therefore. I suppose it all depends on the definition of Spirit in both cases.
* From the Age of Smart Machines (Zuboff 1988), to the Age of Intelligent Machines (Kurzweil 1990), to the Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil 1998), to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2018) in 30 years! The epochs just seem to keep coming, but apparently never the ones that are expected.
** Or perhaps even more aptly resembles the evolutionary theism of the priest-biologist Teilhard de Chardin whose concept of the noösphere, a realm of pure thought that emerges from the biosphere of living things, is the final destination of earthly development. Formulated in the early 20th century, de Chardin’s ideas were of course condemned as heretical by the Church (as were those of his contemporary, Alfred Loisy). See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ January 17, 2020
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