The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

by Ray Kurzweil

  We announced the KRM in January of 1976, and it seemed to strike a chord. All the evening network news programs carried the story, and Walter Cronkite used the machine to read aloud his signature sign-off, “And that’s the way it was, January 13, 1976.”

  Shortly after the announcement, I was invited on the Today show, which was a little nerve-racking since we only had one working reading machine. Sure enough, the machine stopped working a couple of hours before I was scheduled to go on live national television. Our chief engineer frantically took the machine apart, scattering pieces of electronics and wires across the floor of the set. Frank Field, who was going to interview me, walked by and asked if everything was okay. “Sure, Frank,” I replied. “We’re just making a few last-minute adjustments.”

  Our chief engineer put the reading machine back together, and still it didn’t work. Finally, he used a time-honored method of repairing delicate electronic equipment and slammed the reading machine against a table. From that moment, it worked just fine. Its live television debut then proceeded without a hitch.

  Stevie Wonder heard about our appearance on the Today show, and decided to check out the story himself. Our receptionist was skeptical that the person on the other end of the line was really the legendary singer, but she put the call through to me, anyway. I invited him over, and he tried out the machine. He beseeched us to provide him with his own reading machine, so we turned the factory upside down to hurriedly finish up our first production unit (we didn’t want to give him the prototype we used on the Today show, as it still had a few battle scars). We showed Stevie how to use it, and off he went in a taxi with his new reading machine by his side.

  We subsequently applied the scanning and omni-font OCR to commercial uses such as entering data into databases and into the emerging word-processing computers. New information services, such as Lexus (an online legal research service) and Nexus (a news service), were built using the Kurzweil Data Entry Machine to scan and recognize written documents.

  In 1978, after years of scrambling to raise funds for our venture, we were fortunate in attracting interest and investment from a big company: Xerox. Most Xerox products transferred electronic information onto paper. They saw the Kurzweil scanning and OCR technology as providing a bridge back from the world of paper to the electronic world, so in 1980 they bought the company. You can still buy the OCR we originally developed, suitably updated-it’s now called Xerox TextBridge, and continues as a market leader.

  I kept up my relationship with Stevie Wonder, and on one of our gettogethers at his new Los Angeles recording studio in 1982, he lamented the state of affairs in the world of musical instruments. On the one hand, there was the world of acoustic instruments, such as the piano, violin, and guitar, which provided the rich complex sounds of choice for most musicians. While musically satisfying, these instruments suffered from a panoply of limitations. Most musicians could play only one or two different instruments. Even if you could play more than one, you couldn’t play more than one at a time. Most instuments only produce one note at at time. There were very limited means available to shape the sounds.

  On the other hand, there was the world of electronic instruments, in which these control limitations disappeared. In the computerized world, you could record one line of music on a sequencer, play it back, and record another sequence over it, building up a multi-instrumental composition line by line. You could edit wrong notes without replaying the entire sequence. You could layer multiple sounds, modify their sonic characteristics, play songs in nonreal time, and use a great variety of other techniques. There was only one problem. The sounds you had to work with in the electronic world sounded very thin, rather like an organ, or an electronically processed organ.

  Wouldn’t it be great, Stevie mused, if we could use the extraordinarily flexible computer-control methods on the beautiful sounds of acoustic instruments? I thought about it and it sounded quite doable, so that meeting constituted the founding of Kurzweil Music Systems, and defined its raison d’être

  With Stevie Wonder as our musical adviser, we set out to combine these two worlds of music. In Jun of 1983, we demonstrated an engineering prototype of the Kurzweil 250 (K250) and introduced it commercially in 1984. The K250 is considered to be the first electronic musical insturment to successfully emulate the complex sound response of a grand piano and virtually all other orchestral instruments.

  Earlier, my father, who was a noted musician, had played a role in developing my interest in electronic music. Before his death in 1970, he told me that he believed I would one day combine my interests and in music, as he felt there was a natural affinity between the two. I remember that when my father wanted to hear one of his orchestral compositions, he had to engage an entire orchestra. This meant raising money, mimeographing copies of handwritten sheet music, selecting and hiring the right musicians, and arranging a hall in which they could play. After all of that, he would get to hear his composition for the first time. God forbid if he didn’t like the composition exactly the way it was, for then he would have to dismiss the musicians, spend days rewriting modified scores by hand, raise more money, rehire the musicians, and get them back together. Today a musician can hear her multi-instrumental composition on a Kurzweil or other synthesizer, make changes as easily as one would to a letter on a word processor, and hear the results instantly.

  I sold Kurzweil Music Systmes to a Korean company, Young Chang, the world’s largest piano manufacturer, in 1990. Kurzweil Music Systmes remains one of the leading brands of electronic musical instruments in the world and is sold in forty-five countries.

  I also started Kurzweil Applied Intelligence in 1982 with the goal of creating a voice-activated word processor. This is a technology that is hungry for MIPs (that is, computer speed) and megabytes (that is, memory), so early systems limited the size of the vocabulary that users could employ. These early systems also required users to pause briefly between words ... so ... you ... had ... to ... speak ... like ... this. We combined this “discrete word” speech-recognition technology with a medical knowledge base to create a system that enabled doctors to create their medical reports by simply talking to their computers. Our product, called Kurzweil VoiceMed (now Kurzweil Clinical Reporter), actually guides the doctors through the reporting process. We also introduced a general-purpose dictation product called Kurzweil Voice, which enabled users to create written documents by speaking one word at a time to their personal computer. This product became particularly popular with people who have a disability in the use of their hands.

  Just this year, courtesy of Moore’s Law, personal computers became fast enough to recognize fully continuous speech, so I am able to dictate the rest of this book by talking to our latest product, called Voice Xpress Plus, at speeds around a hundred words per minute. Of course, I don’t get a hundred words written every minute since I change my mind a lot, but Voice Xpress doesn’t seem to mind.

  We sold this company as well, to Lemout & Hauspie (L&H), a large speech-and-language technology company with headquarters in Belgium. Shortly after the acquisition by L&H in 1997, we arranged a strategic alliance between the dictation division of L&H (formerly Kurzweil Applied Intelligence) and Microsoft, so our speech technology is likely to be used by Microsoft in future products.

  L&H is also the leader in text-to-speech synthesis and automatic language translation, so the company now has all the technologies needed for a translating telephone. As I mentioned above, we’re now putting together a technology demonstration of a system that will allow you to speak in English with the person at the other end hearing you in German, and vice versa. Eventually, you’ll be able to call anyone in the world and have what you say instantly translated into any popular language. Of course, our ability to misunderstand each other will remain unimpaired.

  Another application of our speech-recognition technology, and one of our initial goals, is a listening device for the deaf, essentially the opposite of a reading machine for the blind. B
y recognizing natural continuous speech in real time, the device will enable a deaf person to read what people are saying, thereby overcoming the principal handicap associated with deafness.

  In 1996, I founded a new reading-technology company called Kurzweil Educational Systems, which has developed a new generation of print-to-speech reading software for sighted persons with reading well as a new reading machine for blind people. The reading-disabilities version, called the Kurzweil 3000, scans a printed document, displays the page just as it appears in the original document (for example, book, magazine), with all of the color graphics and pictures intact. It then reads the document out loud while highlighting the image of the print as it is being read. It essentially does what a reading teacher does-reading to a pupil while exactly what is being read.

  It is the applications of the technology benefiting disabled people that have brought me the greates gratification. tween the capabilities of contemporary computers and the needs of a disabled person. We’re not creating cybernetic geniuses today-not intelligence of our present-day intellignet computers is narrow, which can provide effective solutions for the narrow deficits of most disabled persons. The restricted intelligence of the machine works effectively with the broad and flexible intelligence of the disabled person. Overcoming the handicaps associated with disabilities using Al technologies has long been a personal goal of mine. With regard to the major physical and sensory disabilities, I believe that in a couple of decades we will come to herald the effective end of handicaps. As amplifiers of numan thought, computers have great potential to assist human expression and to expand creativity for all of us. I hope to continue playing a role in harnessing this potential.

  All of these projects have required the dedication and talents of many brilliant individuals in a broad range of fields. It is always exciting to see-or hear-a new product, and to see its impact on the lives of its users. A great pleasure has been sharing in the creative process, and its fruits, with these many outstanding men and women.

  capable of handling continuous speech and a large vocabulary, has been introduced. Automatic language translation, which rapidly translates web sites from one language to another, is available directly from your web browser. Text-to-speech synthesis for a wide variety of languages has been available for many years. All of these technologies run on personal computers. At Lernout & Hauspie (which acquired my speech-recognition company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, in 1997), we are putting together a technology demonstration of a translating telephone. We expect such a system to be commercially available early in the first decade of the twenty-first century.17

  THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

  First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

  If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

  On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

  —Theodore Kaczynski

  The weavers of Nottingham enjoyed a modest but comfortable lifestyle from their thriving cottage industry of producing fine stockings and lace. This went on for hundreds of years, as their stable family businesses were passed down from generation to generation. But with the invention of the power loom and the other textile automation machines of the early eighteenth century, the weavers’ livelihoods came to an abrupt end. Economic power passed from the weaving families to the owners of the machines.

  Into this turmoil came a young and feebleminded boy named Ned Ludd, who, legend has it, broke two textile factory machines by accident as a result of sheer clumsiness. From that point on, whenever factory equipment was found to have been mysteriously damaged, anyone suspected of foul play would say, “But Ned Ludd did it.”

  In 1812, the desperate weavers formed a secret society, an urban guerrilla army. They made threats and demands of factory owners, many of whom complied. When asked who their leader was, they replied, “Why, General Ned Ludd, of course.” Although the Luddites, as they became known, initially directed most of their violence against the machines, a series of bloody engagements erupted later that year. The tolerance of the Tory government for the Luddites ended, and the movement dissolved with the imprisonment and hanging of prominent members.18

  The ability of machines to displace human employment was not an intellectual exercise for the Luddites. They had seen their way of life turned on its head. It was little comfort to the weavers that new and more lucrative employment had been created to design, manufacture, and market the new machines. There were no government programs to retrain the weavers to become automation designers.

  Although they failed to create a sustained and viable movement, the Luddites have remained a powerful symbol as machines have continued to displace human workers. As one of many examples of the effect of automation on employment, about a third of the U.S. population was involved in the production of agricultural products at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, that percentage is about 3 percent.19 It would have been little comfort to the farmers of a hundred years ago to point out that their lost jobs would ultima
tely be compensated by new jobs in a future electronics industry, or that their descendants could become software designers in Silicon Valley.

  The reality of lost jobs is often more compelling than the indirect promise of new jobs created in distant new industries. When advertising agencies started using Kurzweil synthesizers to create the sound tracks for television commercials rather than hire live musicians, the musicians’ union was not happy about it. We pointed out that the new computer-music technology was actually beneficial to musicians because it made music more exciting. For example, industrial films that had formerly used prerecorded orchestral music (because the limited budget of such films did not allow the hiring of an entire orchestra) were now using original music created by a musician with a synthesizer. As it turned out, this wasn’t a very effective argument, since the synthesizer players tended not to be union members.

  The Luddite philosophy remains very much alive as an ideological inclination, but as a political and economic movement, it remains just below the surface of contemporary debate. The public appears to understand that the creation of new technology is fueling the expansion of economic well-being. The statistics demonstrate quite clearly that automation is creating more and better jobs than it is eliminating. In 1870 only 12 million Americans, representing about one third of the civilian population, had jobs. By 1998, the figure rose to 126 million jobs held by about two thirds of the civilian population.20 The gross national product on a per capita basis and in constant 1958 dollars went from $530 in 1870 to at least ten times that today.21 There has been a comparable change in the actual earning power of available jobs. This 1,000 percent increase in real wealth has resulted in a greatly improved standard of living, better health care and education, and a substantially improved ability to provide for those who need help in our society. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution life expectancy in North America and northwestern Europe was about thirty-seven years. Now, two centuries later, it has doubled, and is continuing to increase.