Scott S. Trimble said
Reading some of the other customer reviews on here kind of bums me out. It seems like people are judging this book based on their own expectations rather than for what it is: an entertaining tour of the most important ideas about artificial intelligence.
I loved this book. But I realize that I am a quirky guy who happens to be fascinated by theoretical science, and who is already fairly well-read about the singularity concept. For me, the book was an entertaining opinion-piece in which Dooling takes the reader on a tour of singularity's main ideas, while making sure to keep the reader entertained the whole way. He touches all the bases from Moore's Law to basic programming concepts (and hits on most of my favorite topics including consciousness, free will, and memes), and he gives the reader a glimpse at the contributions and opinions of all the key personalities from Ray Kurzweil to Bill Joy. Rather than being in depth and technical, the book presents the ideas in an everyman style, and Dooling provides enough specific links and references to point anyone interested in learning more about specific technical topics in the right direction.
In my opinion, Dooling also makes some noteworthy contributions in the form of opinions and hypothetical scenarios. I've spent considerable time reading about artificial intelligence, and Dooling came up with quite a few interesting twists to the usual analysis that were new to me! As long as you have sufficient background knowledge, you will be able to tell when Dooling gets into opinion/speculation mode, and you should take it as such. For example, I personally disagree with his idea that singularity might be just another form of religion, but I am glad to have been exposed to the interesting idea. Bottom line: it is a book of ideas and hypotheticals, not a book about technical information. And I think it's filled with some superb ideas!
R. Silva said
Richard Dooling discusses the growing power of artificial intelligence and the possibility of the "singularity", the point at which artificial intelligence could become self-aware.
Dooling is very amusing, tossing out some great one-liners, and bringing together a wide range of knowledge from the fields of technology, science, and philosophy. He discusses Turing tests, the classic test for "true" artificial intelligence, and expounds on the implications of Moore's Law (that computer processing power doubles every two years).
He talks about current dependence on technology and about a future when man and machine become inseparable and indistinguishable, and about the possibility that humans are well on the way toward inventing the species that will supplant us as the dominant life-form on Earth.
This is serious stuff, and it's pretty fascinating, and all told with lots of humorous anecdotes and bits of trivia. If only Dooling could have stuck to the topic.
Instead, he goes off on tangents based on what appears to be his personal gripes with Microsoft, World of Warcraft, and Richard Dawkins, each of which gets roughly a chapter of general ranting in of the sort you can find in a million blogs and message boards. And none of which have much at all to do with the topic at hand.
I was also disappointed in Dooling's playing up of gender stereotypes, particularly with his attempt at humor regarding World of Warcraft. Dooling loses some his credibility by appearing to have missed the news that there are female gamers. Most of us figured that out about ten years ago. Some of us married one.
The Microsoft stuff was another disappointment. Not that Dooling is fundamentally wrong in his issues with Microsoft. It's just that the same complaints have been bandied around the internet for years, and they have little bearing on the book that Dooling seemed to set out to write.
In fact, the whole second half of the book feels like the author ran out of ideas and was simply grasping and ranting on whatever he felt like.
Which is too bad, because it was all off to a really good start. This is still a very funny book, and a very interesting one. I was entertained. Dooling tells some good stories. If he could have told them in a more coherent way, he might have really had something here.
Brian Stiff said
I bought this book in hopes that it would offer a detailed, analytical discussion of the origins, present state, and possible futures of machine intelligence. In that regard, I'm disappointed. I suppose the subtitle would more aptly read, "Based on Hunter S. Thompson's narrative style, but with the gonzoness". The book dwells more, as other reviewers have noted, on vaguely relevant citations of jargon, quotes taken out of context, snarky comments on hacker and gamer culture, and insubstantial, plebeian drive-by sniping at Microsoft. Sure, the discussion of the parallels between Faust and the scientists of the Manhattan Project is fairly interesting, but I believe this is old hat for most geeks. The 25-page anecdote describing the conspiracy of a father and son to circumvent the wife/mother's effort to get the boy involved in sports instead of the playing World of Warcraft was entertaining, but took up 23 pages more than it needed to. There is definitely no engineering insight into machine intelligence, unless you're able to find something that I missed in the author's retrospective of the early days of word processing and the supposition that Microsoft is trying to screw us all to death with their license enforcement and lack of file-format portability. Several other folks have mentioned the tongue-in-cheek code snippets that the author included; I think he'd actually have been ahead to include, instead, a sprinkling of illustrations from XKCD.
Prior to reading this book, I'd read the wikipedia article discussing the Technological Singularity. It offered a much more concise and technically insightful discussion of this material. I wish I'd saved my money and time, and stopped there, and spent my time reading in-flight magazines instead of trying to get value from this book.
D. A. Waterman said
Dooling has an interesting idea: the Singularity is a religious phenomenon, as well as a technological phenomenon. Dooling introduces this idea, then does not bother to expand upon it until the very last chapter. In the meantime, he proceeds to spend most of this book paraphrasing the work of people like Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, when not criticizing Microsoft or praising Linux.
As a professional computer programmer, I also need to say that Dooling's belief that everybody should learn a programming language before the Singularity is incorrect. Dooling presents Python-language code boxes as examples of the type of programming the reader should learn. However, in my experience, the more intelligent and capable the programmer, the more likely he/she is to use "harder" and less readable computer languages. In theory, I suppose, an ultimate intelligence would write programs directly in machine code, or ones and zeros. Such an intelligence would not need compilers or human-readable programming languages at all. So Dooling can code in Python as much as he wants, but he's deluded if the thinks an AI would be impressed that he took the time to learn some human-readable language which needs a compiler to be converted into machine code. An AI might very well regard him with disdain instead, much like the uber-geeks Dooling describes who disdain Microsoft. Or an uber-geek like myself who disdains the fact that someone is promoting learning Python as a long-term survival strategy.
Mr. Dooling needs to unplug his computer and get out to some conferences and conduct some interviews. I've read every book and essay he lists and the originals are much better organized and more interesting. Dooling adds nothing to any of them: he simply paraphrases these people's work. If Dooling had bothered to phone or email Kurzweil (or anybody at all) then he might have come up with some fresh insights into the religious aspects of the Singularity. Conferences around this happen several times a year, but Dooling has apparently written a book about the subject without attending any of these. Dooling's editor should have insisted that he get out from behind his screen and go talk to somebody. That would have greatly helped this book.
The only religious insights we get from this book are that Dooling worships Linux and he "has faith". We know he has faith because he dislikes Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". Dooling spends a section criticizing Dawkins: basically Dooling claims religion should not be subject to reason or logical inquiry. This explains why this book is such an utter failure: Dooling claims that the Singularity is partly religious, then refuses to engage in the necessary inquiry to try to explain how it affects faith or belief. But isn't the entire point of this book to examine how the Singularity affects religion? If Dooling won't use logic or reason to examine this, then why did he write this book in the first place? Apparently, not only is he not qualified to write about this topic, but does not even want to write about it.
So for future AI's who wish to know how ordinary humans viewed their coming: this book will not help you very much. You already know everything from other, better writer's work. Dooling has simply paraphrased it and has added nothing new of his own.
William E. Adams said
Except that at age 64, with less than ten years experience on a home PC, doing the simplest of operations (including, some would say, 756 or so simple-minded reviews on Amazon) I am smart enough to still be afraid of computers and all the related digital technologies they pioneered. Mr. Dooling comes across in this non-fiction contribution as a guy I would definitely love to share some whiskey with. In an ideal world, the whiskey would be expensive, and would be his, and we would speak of anything but the subject of this book. (I've read two of his novels, although for some reason I did not review them here.) According to Dooling, we face a future in which "machines" are rapidly becoming so much "smarter" than humans, that our enslavement is more likely than not. (Some elites may survive to do for the machines the few tasks they might not be able to accomplish for themselves, but I won't be one of those. I face a rather quick execution if the world Dooling describes does come to pass while I still live.) How much tongue is in his cheek over the course of this humorous, scary look at the near-future? I can't say, because I have no background. It is a tribute to the man, however, that I finished this one understanding so much more than I expected to comprehend. He likes and quotes Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet, and that always disposes me kindly toward an author. He likes and quotes Albert Einstein, who lived only ten miles from me during my first ten years of life. (My father used to drive down Mercer Street in Princeton NJ on a regular basis, and reported Einstein sightings to the rest of the family.) Here is one from Albert that I had never come across before: "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." Since the great scientist died in 1955, he was not speaking of the same exact matters that concern Dooling now, but you get the point, and if you plan to read this book, you likely disagree with it. There are many laugh-out-loud moments here, but a bunch of them are of the black humor mode. The book offers a lot of serious food for thought as well. I think the scariest passage is on page 137, quoting a programming guru, Bill Joy: "I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil...whose possibility spreads well-beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals." In other words, wait 20 years and the next "Unabomber" can, via technology, do bio-terrorism to whole cities rather than send "package explosives" to one office. Yikes. Follow up that nightmare with the quote 11 pages onward, attributed to one Edward Heller: "Man: A creature that, upon the irrefutable evidence of his history, cannot control himself" (could someday be) "in control of all life on earth" (via super-computers.)Yikes again.
I don't think Richard Dooling hates technology at all, at all, as the Irish say, but he sees not just the bright side of the 21st Century, and it is of course, the dark side that we must anticipate. The book isn't perfect. From page 216 to 235 it is mostly about God, religion, atheists and what the super-computers of the future will think about those subjects and do about them. He has serious moments here, and parody sections, and perhaps goes on too long in this vein, although in my opinion, he comes out on the right side of things. All in all, I thank my friend Jim Clark of Kansas for sending this one to me, but I believe it is very worth reading, even for technophobes like me, and even if I had paid for it. Can there be higher praise for a writer than that?
Comments