Ray Kurzweil, whose Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc computer dictation company was bought out for $53m by Lernout & Hauspie NV in 1997 after it was laid low by fraudulent accounting practices (CI No 3,141), has written a book on artificial intelligence. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is published by Viking and costs $25.95. Kurzweil calculates that computers will outpace the human brain in computational power in around 2020. The book was judged by the New York Times Book Review as the best of a new crop of books on AI that also includes Robot: Mere Machines to Transcendent Mind by Hans Moravec (OUP, $25) and When Things Start to Think by Neil Gershenfeld (Henry Holt, $25). Moravec is a principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, and wrote the 1988 book on robotics, Mind Children. Gershenfeld leads the Physics and Media group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-directs the Things That Think research consortium. But philosopher Colin McGinn, who wrote the New York Times review, criticized all three books for too much reliance on the Turing test (just an application of behaviorism…long since abandoned, even by psychologists), and for assuming that we can construct a conscious machine despite our current deep ignorance of the roots of consciousness in the brain and no matter how powerful computers get.
