A few years ago in the peaks and valleys of Vancouver, British Columbia, I used to make a daily uphill trek to the Mountain-top game development studio that was Electronic Arts Canada. Fulfilling a childhood dream of game development, I would spend every day ensconced in games and people that loved them. It was wild.
Strangely enough, one of my sharpest memories of my time at EA was the moment I first saw "The Age of Spiritual Machines". The shiny silver book lay on a table within the studio library, catching my eye whenever it was within sight. I eventually conceded and sat down, to be immediately ensconced. I carried it with me for a few days, every spare breath devoted to its contemplation.
For me, it's the book that hammered home 'truth is stranger than fiction'. It was the most abstract, creative vision that had ever been reconciled with reality. More than the nature of light and energy, more than time itself.
The official site provides a few excerpts and summaries of the basic ideas. Here's one from Chapter Six: Building New Brains.
"Evolution has found a way around the computational limitations of neural circuitry. Cleverly, it has created organisms who in turn invented a computational technology a million times faster than carbon-based neurons. Ultimately, the computing conducted on extremely slow mammalian neural circuits will be ported to a far more versatile and speedier electronic (and photonic) equivalent."
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Excerpts from "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can't recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil's work. The book is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor's talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It's spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I'm not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I've read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they're making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven't heard Dr Taylor's TEDTalk, that's an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it's 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There's a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best ""Fantastic Voyage"" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
Post a Comment