Đang tải... (xem toàn văn)
Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twentyfirst centuryan age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweils prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably result in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with humanlevel capabilities not far behind); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thoughtprovoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.
[...]... construction His latest achievements in the substitution of machinery, not merely for the skill of the human hand, but for the relief of the human intellect, are founded on the use of tools of a still higher order —Charles Babbage All of the fundamental processes we have examined the development of the Universe, the evolution of life-forms, the subsequent evolution of technology—have all progressed in an exponential... understand the world’s knowledge bases, and a profusion of other machines with increasingly broad and flexible intelligence In the second decade of the next century, it will become increasingly difficult to draw any clear distinction between the capabilities of human and machine intelligence The advantages of computer intelligence in terms of speed, accuracy, and capacity will be clear The advantages of human. .. close to the limits of the human auditory system, the phonograph record entered the stage of obsolescence in the first half of the 1990s Although still produced in small quantities, the technology that Edison gave birth to more than a century ago is now approaching antiquity Another example is the print book, a rather mature technojbgy tpday It is now in the stage of the pretenders, with the software-based... important than the creation of the intelligence that created it, and will have profound implications for all aspects of human endeavor, including the nature of work, human learning, government, warfare, the arts, and our concept of ourselves This specter is not yet here But with the emergence of computers that truly rival and exceed the human brain in complexity will come a corresponding ability of machines. .. record of tool making and a progression in the sophistication of tools It requires invention and is itself a continuation of evolution by other means The “genetic code” of the evolutionary process of technology is the record maintained by the tool-making species Just as the genetic code of the early life-forms was simply the chemical composition of the organisms themselves, the written record of early... century, from the mechanical card-based electrical computing technology used in the 1890 U.S census, to the relay-based computers that cracked the Nazi Enigma code, to the vacuum-tubebased computers of the 1950s, to the transistor-based machines of the 1960s, and to all of the generations of integrated circuits of the past four decades Computers are about one hundred million times more powerful for the same... over time.14 The progress of technology in the nineteenth century, for example, greatly exceeded that of earlier centuries, with the building of canals and great ships, the advent of paved roads, the spread of the railroad, the development of the telegraph, and the invention of photography, the bicycle, sewing machine, typewriter, telephone, phonograph, motion picture, automobile, and of course Thomas... you can see —Winston Churchill We’ll come back to the knee of the curve, but let’s delve further into the exponential nature of time In the nineteenth century, a set of unifying principles called the laws of thermodynamics6 was postulated As the name implies, they deal with the dynamic nature of heat and were the first major refinement of the laws of classical mechanics perfected by Isaac Newton a... believe them One often reads predictions of the next several decades discussing a variety of demographic, economic, and political trends that largely ignore the revolutionary impact of machines with their own opinions and agendas Yet we need to reflect on the implications of the gradual, yet inevitable, emergence of true competition to the full range of human thought in order to comprehend the world... through the early part of the next century Computers doubled in speed every three years at the beginning of the twentieth century, every two years in the 1950s and 1960s, and are now doubling in speed every twelve months This trend will continue, with computers achieving the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain by around the year 2020 Achieving the basic complexity and capacity of the human . for The Age of Spiritual Machines The Age of Spiritual Machines “ranges widely over such juicy topics as entropy, chaos, the big bang, quantum theory, DNA computers, quantum computers, Godel’s theorem,. Allen Kurzweil, Amy Kurzweil, Arielle Kurzweil, Edith Kurzweil, Ethan Kurzweil, Hannah Kurzweil, Lenny Kurzweil, Missy Kurzweil, Nancy Kurzweil, Peter Kurzweil, Rachel Kurzweil, Sonya Kurzweil, . technology. He is the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, which won the Association of American Publishers’ Award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and The 10% Solution