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quoted 9 lines That reminds me of my favorite end-user-as-designer stories - Kurzweil

> That reminds me of my favorite end-user-as-designer stories - Kurzweil > sythesizers! (The way I remember it ) Before genius Ray Kurzweil made > sythesizers (and now even afterwards) he designed & built reading > machines for the blind. When client Stevie Wonder heard the way Ray's > reading machine used his synthesis to produce artificial speech to read > the books aloud, he encouraged Ray that he could expand the technique to > create a musical instrument, and that started the line of Kurzweil > synths.. Anyway Im sure I didnt mangle the facts too badly, thats the > skinny anyway :)

quoted 1 line check out (if you haven't already) kurzweil's fairly recent book, 'the spir

>> check out (if you haven't already) kurzweil's fairly recent book, 'the spiritual age of machines' or maybe '...of computers,' i can't ever seem to remember titles. anyway, his premise is that due to organic and intellectual evolution, moore's law about exponential growth, and the sheer complexity of computing power, that we can expect to see fully sentient, self-aware computers (and hence, he proposes, intellectual, spiritual beings) integrating in even deeper ways into human society within the next 100 years. buy it or not, (and i do) he chronicles in detail (often in the first person realm of his own contributions) the development of computers and the intrinsic roles they play in our lives. a deep, MUST READ work!

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since i'm "digested" i don't know if this was mentioned, but "the age of spiritual machines" is now available in paperback... i'd say that while it certainly is an interesting book, it has two major flaws. 1. mr kurzweil does more than just "toot his own horn a bit". could he please stop mentioning how he's writing this book using a dictation system from a company he founded? :) 2. he takes a lot of leaps of faith - while it's pretty easy to believe that hardware will follow moore's law for the immediate future, there's little evidence that software will be capable of utilizing this power in ways that equate to intelligence. you can have as fast of a machine as you like, but until we come up with a good way of programming context-sensitivity, we're still just going to have really fast yet dumb machines. there's a serious lack of depth on a lot of subjects & it's frustrating. despite this, it's still worth reading just to see one vision of what the future holds. but in the end it felt more like scientifically-based science fiction than anything else... obIDM: mouse on mars put on one of the few live shows that i didn't get bored with in a long time. much more entertaining than knob twiddling, even if i did feel like they were hamming it up a bit. :) definately check them out when they stop by your neightborhood. ethan Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 19:32:46 EDT To: idm@hyperreal.org From: matthew d salcido <mattsalcido@juno.com> Subject: Re: kurzweil Message-ID: <19990505.151720.7927.0.mattsalcido@juno.com> ive read this book. its a very interesting read. its called "the age of spiritual machines" and it was published by viking press. one of the things i really liked was that the book wasnt written in a linear chapter to chapter format so you can skip around reading the chapters that capture your interest first. as far as i know its only available in hard cover but its worth your while to check it out even if he does tend to toot his own horn a bit. matt -------- www.spaceistheplace.org/ambientmafia --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org