– Customer review on 15/10/2009

Having read about 70% of this book to date, I fail to understand why it is listed as a NYT bestseller. While it is certainly thought-provoking, the book promotes technologies that are unlikely to succeed as 'promising', going as far as predicting that these technologies will one day be main-stream and provide processors and memories that are thousands of times faster than what we have now. The book builds its case on the success of one of these technologies.

I'm a computer scientist with over 30 years experience. I've seen many new technologies being promoted as the next new thing. I've experienced personally the rise and sudden fall of 'Bubble memory' in the late 70's and early eighties. One day major corporations were investing billions of dollars in this technology, and the next all facilities were shut down. Bubble memory is now nothing more than a bad memory for many, a black hole that sucked up a lot of money.

I believe that there will be a breakthrough in some new technology in the next 50 years. It could be one of the technologies mentioned in the book, or something completely different. I doubt that any new technology will do any better in simulating the brain than our current computers. The architecture of our computers is based on tabulating machine technology. A program (the equivalent of a tabulating bar) drives processes in its circuitry. That is not how the brain works. I do not believe that intelligence can be programmed - or it would have happened already on a smaller scale. I also do not believe that development is accelerating towards a singularity. Knowledge evolves as each generation builds on the advances of the generations before it and therefore appears to accelerate. I do not think this process will end anytime soon.