The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

I can’t decide if this book was depressing or not. It came out 19 years ago, and even though the author is a little behind in his predictions, a lot of what he wrote about is slowing coming true.

“The Singularity” is that moment when technology kind of …takes over. Kurzweil didn’t come up with the name, but he predicted it’s going to happen somewhere from 2030 to 2050, at which point humans will be kind of expendable.

The books goes very deep to prove its point – it goes to great lengths to prove that the rate of computation power is increasing to the point where it will be able to emulate the human brain before too long. And Kurzweil predicts all sorts of things from that point on – uploading our brains to the cloud, living forever in computers, etc.

Kurzweil doesn’t say whether any of this will be good or bad… it just is. (Sounds horrifying to me, for the record.)

I skimmed a bit of this. A lot of it goes really, really deep into things I didn’t need to be convinced of (or, rather, things I was willing to just trust Kurzweil on). Also, there was apparently a lot of “offline” conversations, because a significant part of the book was devoted to rebutting his critics.

This is a latest in a series of books I’ve read that push the idea of technology as a pseudo-living thing that is using humans as a vector to expand. I wrote about it a bit on LinkedIn.

A mixed bag, really. The book is notable – I’ve been to read it for years. But I don’t think it needed to be 500 pages to prove the point.

Postscript

The NY Times did a recent article on Kurzweil and how he still believes he’s going to merge with technology: Ray Kurzweil Still Says He Will Merge With A.I.

Now that Mr. Kurzweil is 76 years old and is moving a lot slower than he used to, his predictions carry an added edge. He has long said he plans to experience the Singularity, merge with A.I. and, in this way, live indefinitely. But if the Singularity arrives in 2045, as he claims it will, there is no guarantee he will be alive to see it.

Apparently, he’s published another book (I missed this): The Singularity is Nearer.

Book Info