The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Ray Kurzweil

Sept 2005 · Sold by Penguin

About this eBook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development.

“Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times
“Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.
 
While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

Ratings and reviews

Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" is a mammoth book predicting the era when biological brains are connected with non-biological brains. It's quite an interesting read on what the author promises to be a huge paradigm shift happening between 2020 and 2030, where genetics, robotics and nanotechnology will reach levels allowing us to connect our brains with electronics and upload our intelligence into the cloud and crowdsource intelligence. It’s a very, very, very big deal for humanity, to be able to solve problems with this superintelligence that we as individuals cannot solve. The book is quite thick and I feel like the author repeated himself over and over again, trying to reiterate the rule of accelerated returns. He provides ample examples of why this revolution is really around the corner and will be achieved. Given all these examples, it’s actually quite convincing. In addition, he does go on a lot of other technology-related tangents, that by themselves are very interesting too, but might not really belong in this book, in my opinion. The book could have been half its size if you remove all its redundancies without compromising its main point.

His insight into the exponential nature of technological progress opened up the world as we know it - a world he has largely shaped. Kurzweil is one of a kind.

Ray Kurzweil is with out doubt knows what he is talking about. This is a great read. Ray does think too highly of what society will use this technology for. He is a bit on the dreamer with wishful thinking.

About the author

Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for more than six decades—longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a GRAMMY® Award for outstanding achievement in music technology. He is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has written five books including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind, both New York Times bestsellers, and Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.