Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm a long-time fan of all things AI, and for example, I'd give 4-5 stars to "How to Create a Mind" by Ray Kurzweil. This book needed an editor who could understand the difference between useful insight and mindless spouting off of sentences. There are thousands of paragraphs that read like this: A super intelligence might have a deep and rich personality, possessing more humor, more love, and more loyalty than any human, or it might have none of these. If it had these rich personalities then they might not even be recognizable to humans. If they were recognizable, humans may appreciate them. If they are not easily recognized, humans may not appreciate them. It it turns out that they do not have any of these qualities, it may still however appear to humans that they do have them, because of their complexity. But complexity does not necessarily equate to richness. An emotion could be complex, but not deep, or rich. Or, an emotion could be rich, but not complex. In any case, it is not know whether they will indeed have personalities, or simply seem to have them. Nor is it certain how humans may react to their possessing, or lack of, credible emotions. This type of completely useless information is 80% of the book. It has very little in the realm of real insight, but rather lists every possible possibility direction that could be taken, but then goes nowhere. In fact most of the book could have been written thousands of years ago because all it amounts to is a collection of "if this then that, or the other. But if not this, then maybe not that or maybe not the other". I finished the whole thing just because I love the topic, but I cannot recommend it to anyone. The whole book should have been edited down to 10% of it's size. Then, it would seem like an interesting consideration of the many possible futures. But as it is, it's a nearly unbearable waste of 90% of the time it will take you to get through it.