Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Dooling
Publisher: Harmony
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 192481
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0307405257
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.48
EAN: 9780307405258
ASIN: 0307405257
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
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Product Description
Will the Geeks inherit the earth?
If computers become twice as fast and twice as capable every two years, how long is it before they’re as intelligent as humans? More intelligent? And then in two more years, twice as intelligent? How long before you won’t be able to tell if you are texting a person or an especially ingenious chatterbot program designed to simulate intelligent human conversation?
According to Richard Dooling in Rapture for the Geeks—maybe not that long. It took humans millions of years to develop opposable thumbs (which we now use to build computers), but computers go from megabytes to gigabytes in five years; from the invention of the PC to the Internet in less than fifteen. At the accelerating rate of technological development, AI should surpass IQ in the next seven to thirty-seven years (depending on who you ask). We are sluggish biological sorcerers, but we’ve managed to create whiz-bang machines that are evolving much faster than we are.
In this fascinating, entertaining, and illuminating book, Dooling looks at what some of the greatest minds have to say about our role in a future in which technology rapidly leaves us in the dust. As Dooling writes, comparing human evolution to technological evolution is “worse than apples and oranges: It’s appliances versus orangutans.” Is the era of Singularity, when machines outthink humans, almost upon us? Will we be enslaved by our supercomputer overlords, as many a sci-fi writer has wondered? Or will humans live lives of leisure with computers doing all the heavy lifting?
With antic wit, fearless prescience, and common sense, Dooling provocatively examines nothing less than what it means to be human in what he playfully calls the age of b.s. (before Singularity)—and what life will be like when we are no longer alone with Mother Nature at Darwin’s card table. Are computers thinking and feeling if they can mimic human speech and emotions? Does processing capability equal consciousness? What happens to our quaint beliefs about God when we’re all worshipping technology? What if the human compulsion to create ever more capable machines ultimately leads to our own extinction? Will human ingenuity and faith ultimately prevail over our technological obsessions? Dooling hopes so, and his cautionary glimpses into the future are the best medicine to restore our humanity.
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| Customer Reviews:
I am going to buy several to share January 7, 2009
Full disclosure: While not a friend, or even acquaintance, of the author, (we met once at a book-signing many years ago) he and I have occasionally e-mailed for years. Richard Dooling is a smart, funny, and engaging writer who never fails to entertain. (And while on the topic of full disclosure, we both were graduated from high school in 1972 but he has accomplished way more than I have; I am quite envious!) White Man's Grave remains a novel on my list of all-time favorites. Blue Streak was a brilliant and biting look at how confused we are about language and propriety. I was eagerly looking forward to this book. But I did not quite find what I was seeking.
Part of the problem is just how confusing and vague all this is. There are web sites galore dedicated to showing how silly predictions from the past now look. "If current trends continue..." is the beginning of many silly and foolish sentences. One of the things most astonishing to me is that a person from the 50s could return to my life and with a few minor adjustments, do just fine. We live in single family houses spaced in about the same way he did. We drive cars to the office, just as he did. We work in an office quite similar to his. We wear clothes he would recognize (though not as appropriate work attire!) and his wardrobe, while possibly looking quaint, would not really stand out. Nor would his haircut, language, or music. Sure, there are computers behind everything, including doorknobs, watches, and toasters, but the basic premises are still the same. The phone has no cord, and can be used anywhere, but if you told him, "Here's how you dial this...and you need 9 numbers now" I think it wouldn't be a problem. Our music comes from a box with platters that go in, rather than on, it or one that has buttons instead of dials. The TV has more choices, but works about the same. You get the idea. Our baseball stadiums, movie theaters, restaurants, traffic lights, grocery stores, and high schools would be far more familiar to Mr. 1959 than his would have been to a transplanted Mr. 1909. Things aren't all that different in many ways. Yet no one in 1959 would have imagined that here in 2009, 8 years AFTER 2001, life would look so similar. Predicting the future is hard!
Another problem is, as touched upon by another reviewer, the lack of a clear definition of what intelligence is. And how it differs from consciousness. A newborn baby, with virtually no knowledge and who-knows-how-much-intelligence, has consciousness, which, I think we'd agree, distinguishes him from a machine. The baby cannot pass the Turing test. Yet he has something the machine does not, and can not, have. A two year old can easily tell the difference between a glass apple and a real one on sight. So, who's more intelligent, the toddler, or a computer, which would have a very hard time distinguishing? Just what does intelligent mean? I don't think I'd ever want a computer to go to the grocery store for me to buy fruit. No matter how "intelligent" it is.
And, it does meander a bit toward the end, where his love and admiration for Open Source options (shared by me) goes on too long. The diatribe against the evil empire, which does stifle and limit and restrict and slow the development of computers however it can, other than where necessary to sell more and more bloated and sluggish Vistas, just isn't integrated as well as it could have been. See paragraph two above...AT&T, GM, US Steel and other huge 1950's corporations are tottering or dead. Microsoft could be in the same boat soon and join Burroughs and Honeywell and DEC in a museum of once massively important concerns.
It is still a fascinating, worthwhile, and informative read. I learned a lot about what some people think the future holds. And I was scared and tickled by what they imagine. The speculations were intriguing, the excerpts well chosen. The Unabomber stuff was riveting. And Rapture for the Geeks was often laugh out loud funny; its EULA worth the price of admission alone. Just a little slight for the momentous topic he has tackled.
 A great look at the coming Tech Singularity that you need to read January 6, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Rapture For the Geeks take a satirical, yet deep look into what is know as the AI(Artificial Intelligents) Singularity that is approaching. It goes into the explanation of Moore's law, that technology(especially computers) doubles every two years. At that rate, we should have a computer as powerful as the human mind in the next 10 years. This book also dives into the look at both the light and dark sides of AI, the best and the worse situations that can happen.
It also dives into the cultural and social issues of technology and how they are changing the modern home and parent child relation ship as the first video game generation is having children and how they both play the same MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer online Role Playing Game for those not down with the lingo).
I believe that this book will go down as the one book that we will look back and say that Richard Dooling had it all right. The new computer AI religion may hold him as an apostle to Linus Torvalds (the founder of linux, an awesome operating system based on UNIX). Come and read this book for it will entertain and educate at the same time
Ecletic and wandering but interesting November 14, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The author provides a balanced view of the "singularity" and gives Ray Kurzweil his due. The suggestion that humans learn programming languages to make us somewhat more acceptable to our AI successors is a bit of a stretch, as if we were dogs learning tricks to keep our owners feeding us. Of course, learning programming is a good idea but for pete's sake -- if computers are a threat, don't we need to put in safeguards? But I'm not trashing the book; it is a fun read and the author is obviously well educated in both the classics and in current scifi literature. He suggests that religion, in one form or another, will be with us always. I read it on the Kindle and took a few notes along the way. Good read.
Bill Yarberry, Houston, Texas
 Good Start, Poor Finish November 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While this book started out well, it dropped off quickly from there. Very readable, fairly humorous, but not very techinical it began with a good introduction to the future of technology and AI, but devolved from there into a series of largely irrelevant essays on computer programming. The author, a lawyer, not an engineer, becomes overly fascinated with his own knowledge and repeatedly just threw in snippets of code or tech jargon, apparently for no other purpose than to impress us with his knowledge. Also most annoying were his completely pointless rants about Microsoft. Now I have nothing particular against Microsoft bashing, but it didn't have anything to do with the subject of the book. I can get that for free on the Internet on any Linux forum out there, so why should I have to pay $15 for the honor?
In all a decent intro to the subject though, at least I know what books I want to read now.
But how do you know when machine IQ > human IQ? October 18, 2008
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
Intelligent machines are a reality to some, a curiosity to others, and a source of intense debate to the majority of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and computer engineers. When studying the history of artificial intelligence one finds a roller coaster ride of confidence and self-doubt, with one discovery after another eventually trivialized to a degree that one wonders what the hype was about in the first place. But in this regard it is amazing to find that in this same history one rarely comes across serious proposals for measuring the intelligence of a machine. This omission makes it hard to judge progress in the field, and no doubt is the source of the above-mentioned trivializations that encourage the belief that AI is a fantasy world populated by computer geeks and science-fiction writers.
This book, written for the ill-defined "popular audience", follows the same trend that most books of its kind do, and aggravates the phenomenon mentioned in the last paragraph. No proposals are made for assessing the degree to which a machine is intelligence, in spite of its title. Can one in fact speak of the "IQ" of a machine, and if so how does one calculate or estimate it? The author does not give any advice in this regard, which is surprising indeed since a lot of space in the book is devoted to the articulation of what some have called a "technological singularity." This is a point or interval of time in the future where the rate of technological progress is essentially infinite, and has been predicted by some to happen sometime in the next few decades. There has been some good empirical evidence given that supports the notion of a technological singularity, but in recent years it seems that the search for more evidence has been replaced by marketing hype.
In spite of these omissions, the book should be of interest to those who want a more light-hearted introduction to artificial intelligence and its place in the modern world. The author displays a good sense of humor, but his anxieties about modern technology are readily apparent, with a fair portion of the book devoted to airing the views of noted technoreactionists. Interesting though is his defense of some technology-induced pastimes such as gaming, with its heavy reliance on the mental activities of "telescoping" and "probing."
In general the book is optimistic, with this optimism almost cloaked in an "inevitability" theme for the ongoing technological growth. The author is right when he states that humans crave novelty and are a restless and creative species. These attitudes instigated technological innovation and are now in symbiosis with it. Whether this relationship will evolve into dependence is an open question, but the trend seems to be that machines will play a role that is both dominant and subservient. Intelligent machines have and will continue to have dominance in areas such as financial engineering, medical diagnostics and prognostics, and network management. But to this date no machine has exhibited curiosity or expertise in many different domains. Humans still hold the edge here, today at least, but probably not tomorrow. One thing is certain though, and that is that our adventure with the machines is just beginning.
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