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By taking a religiously and spiritually literature approach, this volume gets the heart of several emerging ethical issues crucial to both human identity and personhood beyond the human as technology advances in the areas of human enhancement and artificial intelligence (AI). Several significant questions are addressed by the contributors, such as: How far should we go in improving our biological selves? How long should we aspire to live? What are fair and just human enhancements? When will AIs become people? What does AI spirituality consist of? Can AIs do more than project humour and emotions? What are the religious undertones of these high technology quests for better AI and improved human existence? Established and emerging voices explore these questions, and more, in Spiritualities, ethics, and implications of human enhancement and artificial intelligence.
This volume will be of interest to university students and researchers absorbed by issues surrounding spiritualities, human enhancement, and artificial intelligence; while also providing points for reflection for the wider public as these topics become increasingly important to our common future.
About the author
Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists,
with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called 'the restless
genius' by The Wall Street Journal and 'the ultimate thinking machine' by
Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc.
Magazine, which described him as 'the rightful heir to Thomas Edison'. PBS
selected him as one of the 'sixteen revolutionaries who made America'.
Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first
omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading
machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music
synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral
instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech
recognition. Among Ray's many honors, he received a Grammy Award for
outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the
National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall
of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S.
presidents. Ray has written five national best-selling books, including New
York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A
Mind (2012).
