The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
By Ray Kurzweil
Couldn't load pickup availability
Share
About the Book
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTUAL PEOPLE IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The noted inventor and futurist’s successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come
Since it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near and its vision of an exponential future have spawned a worldwide movement. Kurzweil’s predictions about technological advancements have largely come true, with concepts like AI, intelligent machines, and biotechnology now widely familiar to the public.
In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances toward the Singularity—assessing his 1999 prediction that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and examining the exponential growth of technology—that, in the near future, will expand human intelligence a millionfold and change human life forever. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world, atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by connecting our brains to the cloud; how exponential technologies are propelling innovation forward in all industries and improving all aspects of our well-being such as declining poverty and violence; and the growth of renewable energy and 3-D printing. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics of current controversy as how AI will impact employment and the safety of autonomous cars, and “After Life” technology, which aims to virtually revive deceased individuals through a combination of their data and DNA.
The culmination of six decades of research on artificial intelligence, The Singularity Is Nearer is Ray Kurzweil’s crowning contribution to the story of this science and the revolution that is to come.
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.
Editorial Reviews
A fascinating exploration of our future, which raises the most profound philosophical questions.” —Yuval Noah Harari, New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens
“Few people have shaped how the world thinks about AI like Ray Kurzweil. Now, with The Singularity Is Nearer, he has written an updated, expansive and hopeful guide to a fast-approaching future that will once again set the terms of debate. Grounded in decades of meticulous research, and written with impressive clarity across an immense canvas, it’s essential reading for anyone wanting to understand our exponential times.” —Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI
“No one is more optimistic about technology than Ray Kurzweil.” —The Boston Globe
“The acclaimed futurist demonstrates how a revolutionary future is closer than you might think. . . . Kurzweil’s capacity for predictive thinking should not be underestimated. . . . This book brims with ideas about what lies ahead, and Kurzweil presents his vision with clarity and passion.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Ray Kurzweil’s Moore’s Law abstraction is the most important thing ever graphed. It’s continuity—over his lifetime of writing—is the greatest take-away for the future of humanity, and the future of intelligence.” —Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director of Future Ventures
“Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer is to information technology what Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was to life science—a cogent, fact-based, clear-eyed, multi-disciplinary exposition of a fundamental truth about the world. Just as Darwin demonstrated that all life branched from eons of antecedent roots, Kurzweil shows that epochs of compounding information processing is resulting in a merger of humanity and computational software. The Singularity Is Nearer reads like a thriller because it honestly presents each of the perils of accelerating AI, but then, like an aircraft coming out of a storm, exquisitely lands the reader at a hopeful future filled with economic opportunity and ever-longer life. Kurzweil leaves no stone unturned in his examination of the employment, national security and personal well-being aspects of the coming “singularity” of AI, and the book is packed with directly relevant graphs, statistics and references. Best of all, Ray has given each of us in this book an observatory into the human mind—a personal telescope that lets each of us see better than ever just how our own minds work, what our own consciousness really is, why our merger with AI is inevitable, how it will practically occur and why humanity will be by far the better off as a result. There can be no more salient guide to the next two decades of life than The Singularity Is Nearer.” —Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D., Creator of SiriusXM, United Therapeutics, electric helicopters and the Bina48 robot
“Ray explores mounting evidence that we are—right now—on the brink of a new human civilization. We’ll experience life in a whole new way. Ray shows us how it’s all coming together, today. His evidence overwhelms and inspires. It’s shocking, hopeful, scary, disruptive, poignant, personal, industrial, positive, global, cosmic, and—ultimately—indisputable. Everyone seriously concerned about the future should read this book.” —Dean Kamen, Inventor, entrepreneur, youth educator, award-winning mechanical engineer, recipient of the U.S. National Medal of Technology, inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame
“My view of the future has been forever impacted by Ray Kurzweil. Twenty-four years ago, he predicted AI would reach human-level intelligence by 2029. His vision seemed like a dream and yet here we are, right on track. This book will challenge everything you know about technology, life, and death. It will light you up with answers to today’s most pressing questions about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity.” —Tony Robbins, Global Entrepreneur, Investor, New York Times #1 Bestselling Author, Philanthropist, and the world’s #1 Life and Business Strategist