Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil
Rate this book
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.
- GenresScienceArtificial IntelligenceNonfictionFuturismTechnologyPhilosophySociety
432 pages, Hardcover First published June 25, 2024
About the author
Ray Kurzweil
38books2,089followers
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 61 years – 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 best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near and How To Create A Mind, both New York Times best sellers, and Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. His forthcoming book, The Singularity Is Nearer, will be released June 25, 2024. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.
Ratings & Reviews
What do you think?
Rate this book
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
4.42
33ratings5reviews
5 stars
19 (57%)
4 stars
10 (30%)
3 stars
3 (9%)
2 stars
1 (3%)
1 star
0 (0%)
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Gergo Kiss
13 reviews1 follower
Want to read
December 11, 2023Will this book be published in a post-AGI world? I have the sense it is already too late for informing us about the upcoming urgency.
Marctar
23 reviews2 followers
Read
November 8, 2020I read a preprint, but withholding my review and rating until the book's published.
Thomas the reader
322 reviews61 followers
Kurzweil is no longer generating any ideas. Repetitive rehashings of thoughts beaten to death. His original ‘The Singularity is Near’ is still a classic banger and obligatory reading (to be in the present and understand what is going on right - now the only reasonable position is to be a singularitarian, imho 😉), yet this should’ve just been an addition chapter to a new edition of that book. I’m afraid he won’t make it to the singularity himself though, judging by the fact that his mind seems to have died, symbolically, that he is in the downturn of life. His soul does not generate, it clings. Joking aside, unless the law of accelerating returns is integrated into your worldview you very likely have no idea what is going on and your opinions should be automatically disqualified and ignored.
- ai
Jan
1,341 reviews7 followers
A good update on the singularity in near. A well written and thought out book.
- animals artificial-intelligence futurism
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews