Talk:The Age of Spiritual Machines

Rebranding?
Seems like a massive overtaking of the term 'spiritual' - I see nothing spiritual about these concepts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Terbospeed (talk • contribs) 03:08, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Whoa
Whoa, I suspect we shouldn't use this text.
 * Pardon?
 * Please sign your posts. I suspect s/he suspects it's a copyright violation, cause it reads like an ad. A quick google shows the summary to be from the book jacket. (I don't have the book at hand, maybe someone can check the rest. ) Needs to be fixed. GangofOne 10:42, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Spelling
To whom it may concern:

On page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines, I believe that "revolutionising" should be spelled "revolutionizing"--unless "revolutionising" is a valid British varient (which I seriously doubt). Even Google asks, "Did you mean: revolutionizing", which I would understand to be the preferred if not the only valid spelling.

Thank you for your attention.

Jim Berger jeberger@uchug.org
 * You may be right. Google is not infallible, however. GangofOne 10:42, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Unsourced material
Can anyone provide a source for the following? Thanks! - Tbsdy lives (talk) 04:34, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Alex Proyas, the director of the film I, Robot, asked every cast member to read this book before filming.

2072
Picoengineering (technology on the scale of trillionths of a meter) becomes practical.[clarify]

I put a tag there as Ray Kurzweil is usually very thorough and yet I find no discussion of this Picoengineering besides its size. A thousand times smaller than the molecular scale? What would it do, be like etc.? Perhaps a "Please expand" tag would be more apt. Wikkrockiana (talk) 06:24, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Removing graph PPTCountdowntoSingularityLinear.jpg
I am removing the graph titled "PPTCountdowntoSingularityLinear.jpg" from this page and all pages from which it is linked because it is mathematically trivial, as I have demonstrated in File_talk:PPTCountdowntoSingularityLinear.jpg. I recommend all future graphs of the "technological singularity" be subject to same scrutiny, as anyone with a year of calculus under their belt can make a similar analysis. If you don't believe me, I encourage you to make a graph with the same axes, but instead of choosing significant "events" as data, choose random dates. You should get identical results. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:09, 14 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Let's concentrate the discussion at Talk:Technological singularity. --Petri Krohn (talk) 20:49, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

hey hey hey. hey. hey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_Machines —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.179.89.35 (talk) 10:52, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

2009 Predictions
Why aren't the 2009 predictions included? He made a lot of wrong predictions, I think that's remarkable.

Millstone76 (talk) 18:32, 13 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I kind of agree. I'm currently re-reading the book, partially out of interest to assess the 2009 predictions, and while several proved shockingly accurate, others were waaaaay off. Most glaring example is his (repeated) prediction of continued uninterrupted economic growth. Did a 2009 section exist before but has at some point been removed? It seems kind of odd someone would go to the trouble of listing the '19, '29 and '99 predictions but leave out the '09s. 24.79.89.131 (talk) 05:11, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree. I've added a section on 2009 (looking through the edit history, it had never been included in the first place.) I also added a reference to Kurzweil's discussion of the 2009 predictions in 2010. 28bytes (talk) 16:03, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Seeing that 2019 has about 40 predictions listed, wouldn't listing out a good number of his 2009 predictions be reasonable? Millstone76 (talk) 11:38, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Go for it. I don't think we'd want to list all 108, but a sampling of some of the more interesting ones would be helpful. Maybe 10 or so? The 2019 and later prediction sections seem way too large as is; I imagine someone will want to trim those down a bit at some point. 28bytes (talk) 14:13, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Anyone know of a link to a page listing all predictions and the actual outcome? Even though it would be hard to reduce it to a percentage, I'm sure the reader could make up their own mind--67.204.61.55 (talk) 23:12, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Organization section
Is this section really necessary? It's just a list of the parts and chapters in the book. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.179.91.217 (talk) 15:17, 18 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree it's unnecessary. I'll remove it. 28bytes (talk) 16:06, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Deleting predictions from this article
Per the merger proposal that's been in the article for over a week, I plan to real soon now delete the predictions in this page. Instead like in The Age of Intelligent Machines we'll direct the reader to the main predictions article, and then include a small paragraph of highlights.

The reason for doing this is right now the book article and predictions article completely overlap. This duplication is very unhealthy for reader and editor alike. Eliminating the duplication is the first step, then focusing on cleanup of the predictions in the prediction article is next.

Any comments or better ideas please post to the merger proposal. Thanks. Silas Ropac (talk) 15:10, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * The merger discussion is closed (it passed, based on silence). So I went ahead and removed the inline predictions here. The predictions article is now the main/only location for the detailed list of predictions. If any text from this deleted version is precious, it can now be merged in. However note that the predictions page itself is going to have to be massively trimmed down, so it might not be worth the effort. Note that I added a reference to a web page hosted by Penguin with all the predictions enumerated verbatim. We could highlight this reference more than it is now, but it contains everything. Silas Ropac (talk) 22:32, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Other possible sources
Silas Ropac (talk) 18:32, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅ McGinn, Colin. Hello, HAL The New York Times. 1999-01-03.
 * ✅ The Age of Spiritual Machines.(Review) in Science April 30, 1999. Diane Proudfoot.
 * ✅ The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. ASEE Prism December 1 1999. Lyle Feisel.
 * ✅ John Searle review in The New York Review of Books April 8, 1999
 * Kurzweil and Searle Exchange in The New York Review of Books and May 20, 1999.
 * ✅ Bencivenga, Jim. 'Human machines - get used to it The Christian Science Monitor. 1999-03-11.
 * Blume, Harvey. The Weatherman. The Atlantic. 1999-02-24.
 * On Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines
 * ✅ Raymo, Chet. The Machine of a new soul. The Boston Globe. 1998-12-27.

In other media
Might I suggest adding a reference to the Amazon Prime Video series Upload (TV series), which is based on the premise of people being able to upload their consciousness to a computer system, through a destructive process as described in the book (though much more dramatically for TV). The timeframe generally matches Kurzweil's with the beginning of the TV Series taking place in 2033. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alphaman (talk • contribs) 18:04, 8 July 2020 (UTC)