So I've only had a chance to glance through this book. Partially because I've been busy and it hasn't been a high priority to read, and partially because I find it alienating and scary. Kurzweil is the author of a bunch of books - The Age of Spritual Machines: When Computers exceed Human Intelligence, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to live forever - to name two that the library has. So basically he thinks that machines will become self aware, the amount of information in the world will keep doubling faster and faster until it reaches a point (the singularity), human beings will incorporate machine parts into their bodies (which of course has been happening for a very long time: from wooden legs to hearing aids), and people will be able to live (virtually) forever, either biologically or by putting our consiousness onto machines. If you've read SciFi writer and Mathematician Rudy Rucker's books (Especially the *ware series) he deals with these themes with humor and a critical eye. Robert Anton Wilson deals with similar themes in a very thoughtful way too. Ray Kurzweil is obviously obsessed with these themes. It is his life work and this shines through in his books. They are massive and well research and very interesting. He also comes across as a bit of a fundamentalist. His faith in the singularity and his futurist vision of the future is very strong. Its also more than a little disconcerting. Especially to someone whole doesn't share Kurzweil's technophilia. Kurzweil is sure that the only outcome of high technology is immortality and a bold future. He brings up many of the dangers of our technolgical future, but it seems from a far from thurough reading that it is mainly to head criticism off at the pass. His section where he responds to criticism does not include a single criticism that questions the desirability of increased technology with no limits. A criticism of Technophilia and questioning the desirability of the direction technolgy is taking seems to make as much sense to Kurzweil as questioning the existense of God to a Fundamentalist Christian. In any case, I don't mean that as slander. I am not suggesting that Kurzweil shares other characteristics with Christian fundamentalists. His books seem very interesting and influencial. Hopefully I'll get a chance to give The Singularity is Near a thorough reading. Preferably before the coming of the singularity, or the colapse of industrial civilization, whichever comes first.
Another book I've been looking at is Bryan D. Palmer's Culture of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression [From Medieval to Modern].
Peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slave, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats and contemporay youth gangs-those who defied authority, chosing to live dangerously outside the defining cultural dominations of early insurgent and, later, dominant capitalism are what Bryan D. Palmer calls people of the night. (From the back of the book).So anyone who knows me can see why I'd find this book very exciting! Palmer is a well respected Canadian labor historian and this is an amazing work of synthesis. At least it seems to be. I haven't even had much of a chance to look at it, but I will get around to it eventually. It looks awesome.
In case anyone is wondering what I have been reading (and not just skimming) here are some of the titles: Daughter of Elysium by Joan Sloncezwski (a wonderful anarcha-feminist scifi book which the library does have), We Should have Killed the King by J.G. Eccarius, Marcus Rediker - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, Dr. Ben Reitman - Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, Tom Vague - Anarchy in the UK: The Angry Brigade, and Ron Sakolsky (ed) - Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States.
