ECAI 2002: 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 21-26 2002, Lyon France, Vol. 77 Book

I wouldn't say I'm sorry I read the book, as there were quite a few quotes and ideas that I hadn't run into before. The book fell short, however, in that it wasn't really the Singularity primer I had hoped for. The author's condescending prose, while sometimes funny (the passage about the Estonian hacker's fitness was interesting), was heavy and depressing. It made me feel as if Dooling doesn't particularly like humanity, or himself for that matter.

Dooling's constant use of footnotes to define even the most basic terms made me wonder who he thought his target audience is. The title is "Ratpure for Geeks" but he writes as if he believes my grandmother saw this on the shelf and decided to pick it up. The author also came off as strangely arrogant. He writes as if he thinks having a linux installation on his machine makes him God's gift to technology.

And speaking of God. I wish he would have layed off the religion. I was going to rank this book as a 3.5 until I got to the last chapter, where he rips apart Dawkins and starts quoting Einstein in a way that would make anyone believe that Einstein was a theist (which at least towards the end of his life, he clearly was NOT). Then he quotes Dostoyevsky, in a way that rephrases the age-old argument that without religion there can be no morality. I had to double check the quote, and sure enough it came from the Brothers Dostoyevsky.

This struck me as intellectually dishonest. It is basically lying to quote a person for a passage in a novel and pass it off as their own beliefs. It made me immediately suspicious of every other quote he used in this book.

Dooling ends the book basically implying that he's going to focus on his soul and the afterlife, which I thought was nauseating. I strongly suspect that there was a lot more injection of his own religious beliefs in the book that was lost in editing.

There were some good parts. It was the first time I heard about the Darwin Among the Machines article, as well as the Kurzweil poetry engine. So I give it two stars. Not a total waste of time, but I wouldn't recommend it.

btw - There were WAY too many Warcraft references in this book. It got tedious. At the end in the acknowledgments, he admits that he's never played the game. What a poser.