Markkula Center of Applied Ethics  The Age of Spiritual Machines
By Ray Kurzweil Viking Press (1999) reviewed by Neil Quinn
You’ve had a rotten day. All you want is to go home and get a
little sympathy, but your spouse just shrugs off your troubles
and suggests how you might do things differently so that your
woes won’t return. This is not the understanding you had in
mind.  Cheer up. If Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual
Machines, is right, in a few years you may be able to
commiserate with the very person who understands you best: you
(albeit in a silicon-based life form).  Extrapolating from the
history of computing (very systematically presented in The Age
of Spiritual Machines), Kurzweil predicts that silicon-based
life forms with the thinking capacity of humans should start
arriving on the scene around 2029. This estimate is based on
Kurzweil’s theory of "time and chaos," which suggests that
evolutionary time is accelerating.  It took evolution 4 billion
years to create the first human being