Rhetorical Analysis

In Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, one of his main arguments is that one day, in the near future, artificial intelligence will exceed the intelligence of humans. He predicts this largely on the idea of the intelligence of evolution. It took evolution millions of years to make the human being that we are today and it only took humans a few thousand years to create technology. Since you are considered smarted if you are able to do something faster, humans are smarter then our creator, evolution. Kurzweil predicts the same thing to happen with technology becoming smarter then its creator which would be us. He develops his argument through the use of pathos and karios. Kurzweil develops his argument through the use of pathos. Pathos

It makes the problem appear more important to the reader if it is actually something that is happening as they are reading it. He states, “And so, too, will the intelligence that we are creating come to exceed the intelligence of its creator. That is not the case today. But… it will take place very soon… even in terms of human history-and within the lifetimes of most readers of this book” (47). This quote from the book directly addresses the reader and tells them that this will happen in your lifetime. All of a sudden something that seemed so distant and impossible becomes reality. Kurzweil also uses the Law of Accelerating Returns to describe to the reader how the evolution of intelligence works. The Law of Accelerating Returns states that “As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time between salient events grows shorter as time passes” (30). This law states that technology will get to a point where it’s intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate. This does not mean that time itself will speed up, but the time in between major technological advances will decrease greatly. The reader realizes then that if the intelligence of technology is increasing exponentially it will not be long at all until it exceeds human intelligence. Kurzweil goes on to make his predictions which show that this is happening as he