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Are We Spiritual Machines? Are We Machines at All?

Inventor Ray Kurzweil proposed in 1999 that within the next thirty years we will upload ourselves into computers as virtual persons, programs on machines

I’ve been reviewing philosopher and programmer Erik Larson’s The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. See my earlier posts, hereherehere, and here.

The event at which I moderated the discussion about Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines was the 1998 George Gilder Telecosm conference, which occurred in the fall of that year at Lake Tahoe (I remember baseball players Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire chasing each other for home run leadership at the time). In response to the discussion, I wrote a paper for First Things titled “Are We Spiritual Machines?”  it is still available online at the link just given, and its arguments remain current and relevant.


William A. Dembski, “Are we spiritual machines?” at First Things (October 1999)

An abridged version of this article then appeared in an anthology edited by my friend and colleague Jay RichardsAre We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil and the Critics of Strong AI. This anthology is still available and still worthy of attention, if only to point out how the same themes and misconceptions about AI persist.

You may also wish to read:

A critical look at the myth of “deep learning” “Deep learning” is as misnamed a computational technique as exists. The phrase “deep learning” suggests that the machine is doing something profound and beyond the capacity of humans. That’s far from the case.

Artificial intelligence understands by not understanding The secret to writing a program for a sympathetic chatbot is surprisingly simple… We needed to encode grammatical patterns so that we could reflect back what the human wrote, whether as a question or statement.

Automated driving and other failures of AI How would autonomous cars manage in an environment where eye contact with other drivers is important? In cossetted and sanitized environments in the U.S., we have no clue of what AI must achieve to truly match what humans can do.


Artificial intelligence: Unseating the inevitability narrative. William Dembski: World-class chess, Go, and Jeopardy-playing programs are impressive, but they prove nothing about whether computers can be made to achieve AGI. In The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, Erik Larson shows that neither science nor philosophy back up the idea of an AI superintelligence taking over.

William A. Dembski

Board of Directors, Discovery Institute

Are We Spiritual Machines? Are We Machines at All?