Confession: I used to be an AI skeptic, impressed with works like What Computers Can't Do by Hubert Dreyfus. I've moved quite a bit toward non-skepticism over the years, especially lately. But this book, by famed AI prophet and general futurist Ray Kurzweil, makes me look like an old skeptical fogy again. He's really "out there", essentially predicting a future entirely different from the present, thanks to unstoppable trends that are growing exponentially.
And he could well be right. He's in the trenches, plugged in to what's going on.
His big prediction, as billed in this book's subtitle, may strike you as creepy: he thinks the big game-changer will be direct connections between human brains and computers, allowing information transfer back and forth between our puny, poky, biological minds and the cloud. Essentially, our consciousness will be backed up to the cloud. And our cyberspace versions will never sleep, and out-think us by many orders of magnitude. And this will happen, Kurzweil thinks, within a few years, perhaps in the 2030s.
So the book is more than slightly mind-blowing, especially for a geezer who sometimes can't remember why he walked into a room.
The book also contains a general examination of trends that show how "life is getting exponentially better". (Kurzweil is a big fan of that word "exponentially".) I only glitched a bit when he delved into trends in education: what evidence does he have for exponential improvement in that field? Well, he concentrates on education spending; indeed, the growth is real there. But he avoids looking at education outcomes; I think it's arguable that those have been poor; we (in the aggregate) just aren't getting any smarter very fast. Or, in some cases (checks newsfeed) at all.
There's also a section boldly titled with the claim: "Renewable energy is approaching complete replacement of fossil fuels." I think it's arguable that might happen someday; but I'm skeptical that it's happening now. I recently read an article by Bjørn Lomborg that credibly claims:
In the last 10 years, solar and wind power use has reached unprecedented levels. However, this increase hasn’t led to a reduction in fossil fuel consumption. In fact, fossil fuel use has grown during this period.
I.e., we are not approaching "complete replacement of fossil fuels."
Generally, I don't think Kurzweil deals with climate change at all. Which means he doesn't discuss my AI-assisted crackpot solution: Artificial Photosynthesis: aided by AI-designed catalysts, acres of tiny supercharged "leaves" will use solar power to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, combine with some water, to make oxygen and your hydrocarbons of choice. Reader, if this works scalably, we can set the global thermostat wherever you want.
He does, however, discuss the "gray goo" problem: scenarios where those AI-designed processes and self-replicating nanobots get out of hand and destroy humanity. Something to consider.
I smiled at a number of places where Kurzweil makes some (seemingly) serious observations. One example: what are the likely outcomes of self-driving autonomous vehicles? Well, they will cause unemployment of long-haul truck drivers. And the ripple effects of that are ominous:
As truck drivers lose their jobs to automation, there will be less need for people to do truckers' payroll and for retail workers in roadside convenience stores and motels. There'll be less need for people to clean truck stop bathrooms, and lower demand for sex workers in the places truckers frequent today.
Please, won't someone think of the sex workers?!