Faking Intelligence

In Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 book The Age of the Spiritual Machine, the author speculates on the long-term, future effects of Moore’s Law. In its true form, this theory is actually known as Moore’s Law of Integrated Circuits and has a limited scope. In 1965, inventor of the integrated circuit Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors that could fit into a computer chip was doubling roughly every 18 months to 2 years; consequently, over the last 35 years, the capacity and speed of computation has increased at approximately the same accelerated rate. 

Even though the letter of Moore’s Law applies only to the number of transistors in a chip, many theorists – including  Kurzweil – have interpreted it to have much larger implications for our future lives with machines. If, in fact, the capacity of microchips continues to increase exponentially, computers will be making calculations at the same speed as human beings by the year 2020. Speculation about the impact of a functional artificial intelligence range from the utopian to the apocalyptic, as N. Katherine Hayles noted when she warned that “The prospect of becoming posthuman both evokes terror and excites pleasure” (283). While Kurzweil disagrees that the future holds much “terror,” he does predict it will explode with changes.

Technical Challenges and Changes with Artificial Intelligence

Linguistic Challenges and Changes with Artificial Intelligence