Moore's Law, Artificial Evolution, and the Fate of Humanity
More or less simultaneously in the closing year of the twentieth century, there appeared a curious coterie of books whose central, sensational-sounding claim was that humanity was on the verge of producing its own successors, thereby rendering itself both obsolete and superfluous. Chief among these books were The Age of Spiritual Machines by computer engineer and industrialist Ray Kurzweil, Robot by Carnegie-Mellon computer science professor Hans Moravec, and The Spike by technology writer Damien Broderick. There were several others that at least treated this theme seriously, such as Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine. The science-fiction tone of these books is clearly revealed by their subtitles: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Kurzweil), Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Moravec), Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future (Broderick), and The Rise of Neobiological Civilization (Kelly). There would have been little reason for a serious reader to pay any attention to these books and their wild-sounding claims, had their authors not had the most respectable of credentials and had the books not been reviewed in the most serious of venues, often favorably. Thus, Kurzweil's and Moravec's books were reviewed together in the New York Times Sunday Book Review in January 1999, and although the reviewer, Rutgers University philosophy professor Colin McGinn, had some skeptical words to say about their views of consciousness, he essentially accepted all of their technical claims, which are extraordinary, at face value. Scientific American gave Moravec's book its glowing "Editors' Choice." On almost the same spring day of 2000 as Ray Kurzweil was receiving from the hands of President Clinton the National Medal of Technology for his pioneering efforts to help the handicapped through the use of computers, an apocalyptic reaction to the Kurzweil and Moravec books, written by the well-known computer scientist Bill Joy (a co-founder of Sun Microsystems), appeared as a cover article in Wired under the title "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us."
