Ray Kurzweil is an internationally recognized expert on computers and AI (artificial intelligence). Amazon.com lists his works in book, digital or audio. This book was a national bestseller.

As a resource for the history of computing and AI, this book is very thorough - besies the 260 pp of main text, it has a 20 pp Time Line, a 17 pp How to Build an Intelligent Machine in Three Easy Paradigms, a 17 pp Glossary, 29 pp of Notes, 23 pp of Suggested Readings, 8 pp of Web Links, ad a 12 pp Index). His 20-pp Time Line has 16 pp of historical highlights plus 4 pp of his prophetic vision of the future. Since I haven’t read his 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines, I don’t know if this book mainly updates the former.

But I’d change the title of book 183 by replacing the word “spiritual” by “more intelligent.” I can appreciate the advances in computation beyond faster algorithms, recursions and/or parallel neural networks to self-developed improvements or refinements in these types of computing, but where spirituality enters is very unclear because to me spirituality means more than just awareness or self-awareness. So I was eagerly awaiting a discussion of how machines obtain spirituality but I never found it in this book (or any other!).

I believe self-awareness will someday be obtained by computers, so I can understand why Kurzweil believes that “eventually, the distinction between humans and computers will have become sufficiently blurred that when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them.” We may not be very far from the time when a machine will have learned enough to pass the “Turing Test” where a human interrogator will be unable to tell whether it is a human or a machine being interrogated – that is, if the topics exclude spiritual matters. But Ray Kurzweil never addresses this type of questioning. However, since this book is an excellent history source, and Kurzweil’s past predictions of machine progress have been fairly accurate, his scenarios for the future of humans and computers carry weight, if not spirituality. But I recommend one read it for its thorough history.