The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Ray Kurzweil

Sep 2005 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

“Startling in scope and bravado.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.” —Los Angeles Times

“Elaborate, smart and persuasive.” —The Boston Globe

“A pleasure to read.” —The Wall Street Journal

One of CBS News’s Best Fall Books of 2005 • Among St Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 • One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005

A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of How to Create a Mind and The Singularity is Nearer who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

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.

i love Ray Kurzweil and am grateful for the things he has shared and i look uo to him as a source of inspiration and his hopeful attitude mixed with his optimism means the world to me and i think personally is extremely important for us to continue forward in the best way possible 😌❤️😊 I can't fully articulate the depth of intense range of emotions that wash over me while reading any of his work or listening to any of his recorded interviews, lectures, etc....it is definitely an exhilarating time to be alive and human and i am thankful for such a wise person who cares so much to exist at the same time as myself to be able to help make sense of existence and what I can do to help create a better experience for all... I have come to hold deep respect and admiration for this person aand recommend this book and all others of his for anyone.... especially his recent children's book due to it's imperative nature & timeliness for mankind. Wish there were more humans like this around me.

Don't think linear(in case of technology), comes exponential.... Oooh haaa... Kurzweil is known for his astonishing accuracy of predicting the future (86%). In this book he predicts events based on exponential growth of technology up to 2045,beyond which it is unpredictable. This book was written in 2005, it's 2016 today,and his predictions has kept promise.. Nice read. Can help to overcome linear thinking...

About the author

Ray Kurzweil is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Singularity Is Near and the national bestseller The Age of Spiritual Machines, among others. One of the leading inventors of our time, he won a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology in 2015 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. He is the recipient of many honors, including the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation's highest honor in technology. He lives in Boston.