The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

Part of the problem with books making predictions about the future is they only have two markets: (1), people who want to read predictions about the future, and (2) people who want to read the book ten years later and call the author stupid. When I picked up The Age of Spiritual Machines on the advice of my boss, I was only vaguely aware that it was already ten years old. That doesn’t seem so strange, but when you’re talking about technology, that’s forever.

I will readily admit that The Age of Spiritual Machines has aged surprisingly well; but Kurzweil is undoubtedly a smart cookie, even if some of his other, hm, predilections are a bit left-field. But then, too, the easy life of a futurist (especially a technophile) is apparent here, especially when he revisits some of the predictions he made in his first such book: simply predict an upward technological trend and reap the inevitable benefits as a prognosticator par excellence.

Kurzweil spends a great deal of time on exposition: he sets up logical but tenuous parallels between biological evolution and technological progress, expounding at length about the nature of the human brain and its similarities and differences to mechanical and electronic computation machines. He creates a “Law of Accelerating Returns,” which is a little presumptive of him (a law? really?), which, in short, speaks of the exponential rate of technological acceleration, and Kurzweil therefore sees general technological acceleration/evolution as being immune from the sort of asymptotic nature that limits more specific things like Moore’s Law.

The crux, then, of Kurzweil’s book is that there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when we will be able to technologically outpace the human brain: our transistors are already faster than neurons, and more efficient, but still outnumbered by them. This, Kurzweil says, will not last long. The more science understands about the brain, and as the progression of technology (inevitably) surpasses the raw computing power of our brains, we will come across the problems of artificial intelligence, continuity of consciousness, &c. None of which is anything particularly new, but I think Kurzweil’s point is that these will soon be real, pressing questions rather than hypothetical thought experiments in a futurist book.

One rather strange feature of the book was the day each chapter ended with a sort of Q&A: Kurzweil the author talking to some hypothetical questioner who wanted clarification on certain points—a “Little Billy,” if you will, though not quite so hackneyed. I thought this was kind of a weak device: if you need a fake conversation at the end of a chapter to further boil down your already-distilled points further, then you haven’t done your job in the preceding text. Kurzweil’s many sidebars on various topics are distracting but useful; his version of chapter summaries are not.

If Ray Kurzweil wasn’t such a business success and obvious technological genius, I’d write The Age of Spiritual Machines off as underwhelming, somewhat obvious predictions. Or maybe they just seem obvious in retrospect: still, there are plenty of Kurzweil’s contemporaries who think, especially with his latest book about technological singularities, that he’s perhaps drunk too deeply of his own Kool-Aid™. Still, the man is obvious very smart, and so I give him credit for his insight, and as a futurist myself I empathize with him, but I fall short of necessarily praising him as a brilliant prognosticator.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein is known as the father of science fiction, but it’s obvious to anyone who reads him that lumping him with mere storytellers like David Drake or [insert prolific but mediocre science fiction writer here] is very much unfair, because Heinlein placed far more importance upon allegory and message than he did with entertaining narrative. The frightening disparity between Starship Troopers the novel and Starship Troopers the film should illustrate that well enough. It would have been easy for Heinlein to write a thin tome detailing the destruction of very many insectoid creatures and not a few armored humans, but instead he chose to wrote a novel consisting largely of exposition and flashback, dealing with the nature of war, civic duty, and capital punishment.

Thus, it is with no surprise that I tell you that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is not a dashing adventure about lunar colonists, but instead a rather abstract tome, at times quite dry, that chronicles the tragically ironic bid for independence and national sovereignty by the colonists of “Luna” (Earth’s moon) in the year 2076. Much like Australia’s checkered past, Luna is populated largely by ex-convicts who were shipped there either for crimes or to solve the growing overpopulation on earth. Mannie, the novel’s protagonist, is a one-armed computer technician who befriends Mike (short for MyCroft), the intelligent supercomputer. One thing leads to another, and through the tutelage of Professor La Paz, an aging soi-disant “Rational Anarchist,” he foments rebellion and finally outright revolution. I won’t bother going any further than that: if you wish to read plot spoilers, go to Wikipedia.

Heinlein’s peccadilloes are a matter of record—again, see Wikipedia for a more complete background—and it’s easy for me to see now where authors like Leo Frankowski get their damned strange approach to science fiction. The more odd bits of any Heinlein novel—in this case, polyandry and pretty unabashed libertarianism—are the direct result, perhaps, of his odd rather odd views. A good deal of time in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is spent detailing the vagaries of life on the moon, which in Heinlein’s universe includes an approach to sexuality that is both positively Mormon and in some ways oddly enlightened: rape is unheard of on Luna, as any sort of sexual abuse of women is socially proscribed and enforced, but family units are a sort of mixed marital bouillabaisse that would make social conservatives blanch.

But the real crux of the book is political, and follows what some see as a persistent thread is Heinlein’s work—that is, libertarianism, which Heinlein illustrates masterfully, with a sense of irony that is at once subtle and inescapable and positively mammoth. Whereas I believed at first that the book’s conflict would arise from MyCroft’s above-average emotional intelligence, it is in fact the process of Luna’s independence from the bureaucratic-cum-corporate political structures that exist on earth, and all the tragically hilarious and hilariously tragic fighting, fumbling, and finger-pointing pursuant to it.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a wonderful piece of both science fiction and political allegory. Then, too, I could replace title with just about anything from Heinlein’s corpus and the statement would be equally true. Whether you read this (possibly his most overtly political, and certainly his most unabashedly libertarian) or something else, I would suggest reading something by Heinlein.

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

I received Galatea 2.2 as a birthday gift from my brother—previously, I had never heard of Powers, which now surprises me insofar as he seems the sort of enigmatic literary marvels that I seek desperately to find. I resolved to begin as soon as I had finished the books currently on my plate.

Let me be upfront about something: this novel is one of the damnedest things I’ve read in a long time, and I make no claim of understanding it. In short, the book is a mix of autobiography and fiction: Powers writes about a character named Richard Powers, who has written Richard Powers’ books—we can assume that the Powers qua character, at the time the novel begins, is a more or less historically accurate version of Powers qua author. It’s all very PoMo. On a year’s fellowship at a large state school, Powers gets involved with one Phillip Lentz, an arrogant, iconoclastic researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. By some machination of the plot involving a wager, Powers ends up working with him to create an AI that pass a Turing Test as a 22-year-old student of Lit Crit.

But this is merely one half of the plot. Interspersed is Power qua character’s (qua author?) flashbacks to his 10-year relationship with a Dutch girl known only as C., during which he writes the books that make him famous and ends up living for a short time in the Netherlands. This, I might add, is the strangest damn relationship I’ve ever read about, and the reader is not at all engendered to C.: she’s moody, prone to fits of lunacy, and never, it seems, happy.

The crux of the book is Powers’ involvement with the AI project. After several iterations, the longest-latest one is known as Implementation H, which Powers names Helen. Over the course of between 6 and 9 months, he teaches it literature while he writes a new book in fits and starts, lusting after a new woman called A. while becoming disconsolate over his failed relationship with C. One gets the feeling that he is more or less a failure at life, and he enacts this failure in his teaching of—and eventual emotional attachment to—Helen. It’s a warped retelling of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, something which Powers qua author is quite well aware: at one point, he mentions ELIZA, an early “joke” AI. But Powers qua character more or less creates Helen’s personality, shapes it as Henry Higgins turned Eliza Doolittle into a passable English lady…. first under the auspices of a bet, but with greater and greater personal attachment. The only difference is that Henry Higgins didn’t regale the audience with an extra hour of wailing introspection.

Galatea 2.2 isn’t verbally dense in the way that, say, Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses are, requiring a semester of study just to wade through the mud-thick pool of rhetoric; still, it manages to be extraordinarily complex in the way that Powers spins his words into complicated webs. It’s not quite verbal masturbation, but a precise, intricate sort of narration that is both constantly self-referential and maddeningly allusory. He has a particular gift with language, I’ll give him that, though I call shenanigans when it comes to his technical writing. I understand that he was a programmer at one point, and I understand that this book was written in 1995, but I get the feeling that he tries very hard to make sure that his explanation of technical aspects is more complicated than it needs to be. Malapropistic, basically. Not in a “Ted ‘Series of Tubes’ Stevens” sort of way, but in a supercilious “I know that the technical standard for audio CDs is called ‘Red Book’ and I’m going to rub it in your face by using the term even though it’s meaningless to you” sort of way.

This book is exceedingly neat—it has enough talk about AI to keep geeks interested; it has enough literary allusions to keep the most daring of English students on his or her toes; furthermore, it raises some damn good questions about trying to create an associative entity like a brain, the sheer breadth and ability that is involved in such a task. It’s a subject that could have filled a book ten times it size. For all it’s quirks—and rest assured, Galatea 2.2 has them—it’s still an excellent book that will leave you thinking long after you’ve turned the last page.