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“Nimble and entertaining . . . A fascinating historical review of our longtime obsession with machines.”
–David Takami, Seattle Times
In Rapture for the Geeks, Richard Dooling looks at what some of the greatest minds have to say about our roles in a future in which technology rapidly leaves us in the dust. Is the era of Singularity, when machines outthink humans, almost upon us? Will we be enslaved by our supercomputer overlords, as many sci-fi writers have 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.
“One doesn’t expect a nonfiction book to be fascinating, chilling, thoughtful, and funny in equal measure. This one is.”–Kurt Andersen
“Dooling really is onto something here.”–Ars Technica
Novelist and screenwriter Dooling (White Man's Grave) contemplates the "Era of Singularity," the coming day when computers will be able to outthink humans, in this uneven take on the future of machine intelligence. Dooling is at his best when he profiles technology's most captivating futurists: Ray Kurzweil, inventor of scanning and text-to-speech technologies, beguiles with his vision of human minds embedded in silicon chips; physicist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge portrays a bleaker future where humanity serves its hyperintelligent computer overlords. Dooling veers back and forth between celebrating the speed with which technology is evolving and ruing its hidden perils ("our fatal flaw... is Promethean fire-stealing, the instinct to always and everywhere overreach"), along the way touching upon the computer research, various philosophies of mind and intelligence, and the historical tensions between man and machine. While an engaging writer, Dooling tends to indulge in sarcasm and snarky humor, which trivializes the deeper import of his message: that whether machines ever become self-aware, "living" minds, we are losing something of what makes us human when we lose control of our own creations and their meaning. (Oct.)
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Ric Deez
reviewed Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ on September 21, 2013
Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ
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.
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