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The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Paperback – 9 Mar. 2006
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A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of How to Create a Mind and 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.
PRAISE FOR THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR
'Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.' Los Angeles Times'Elaborate, smart and persuasive.' The Boston Globe
'A pleasure to read.' The Wall Street Journal
An Amazon Best Science Book of 2005
A CBS News Best Autumn Books of 2005
A St Louis Post-Dispatch Best Nonfiction Book of 2005
- Print length683 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDuckworth
- Publication date9 Mar. 2006
- Dimensions15.4 x 5 x 23.3 cm
- ISBN-100715635611
- ISBN-13978-0715635612
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'Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.' Los Angeles Times
'Elaborate, smart and persuasive.' The Boston Globe
'A pleasure to read.' --The Wall Street Journal
A CBS News Best Autumn Books of 2005
An Amazon Best Science Book of 2005
--A St Louis Post-Dispatch Best Nonfiction Book of 2005
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Duckworth (9 Mar. 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 683 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0715635611
- ISBN-13 : 978-0715635612
- Dimensions : 15.4 x 5 x 23.3 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 80,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 7 in Discrete Mathematics (Books)
- 54 in Amazon Online Shopping
- 85 in Functional Programming
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." PBS selected him as one of the "sixteen revolutionaries who made America."
Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
Among Ray’s many honors, he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012). He is Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
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In this book the author expands on his vision of the future as he sees it in the next 50 years. The main thrust of the book is that Moore's law is continuing and as such computing power is increasing exponentially (exponentials are a large part of this book). The premise that as computing power increases dramatically we will be able to create even more technology, with the aim to "uploading" ourselves into our computers. This at first seems like science fiction but be assured that the author looks at every detail and examines the feasibility of each stage of his premise. The results are startling, and I must admit give me a strange feeling in the gut of my stomach when I realised the full breadth of his suggestions.
This book could be considered a sequel to the author's previous books, the Age of Intelligent Machines, and the Age of Spiritual Machines. However you don't need to have read these previous books to understand the concepts involved. A basic understanding of genetics and nanotechnology would help, but are not required.
I don't know if the authors predictions will come to pass (And I honestly hope they do!) but I would recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in the future and who wants to prepare themselves in advance.
He has a brilliant grasp of his subject and i would imagine in person he is a tour de force as a speaker.For me however when he started to explain human 2.0 and 3.0 he lost some of his power. When the human organs have all been replaced bar the skin are we still human. The virtual reality sex model is hilarious and deeply troubling. If we can always have the object of our desires virtually,then Pandora'S box is well and truly open.How do real human relationships exist if both partners prefer a younger slimmer model in virtual reality.
I did enjoy the read but i am not a Luddite but very wary of technology which allows me to live to 200.
Lastly I wonder what will happen if when we start to get smarter and closer to the singularity if we will only find new and more troubling ways to hurt,cheat and murder one another?
The extrapolation into the future starts to feel like the “culture” civilisation in an Iain M Banks Sci Fi novel. Difficult to know who got what ideas from who.
Don’t know whether to be optimistic or terrified about the future. I’m nearly 50 years old, so I’ll definitely be taking my Statins, vitamins and blood pressure pills in the hope that I can “live long enough to to live forever”
The only thing I take issue with him on, is... no I won't spoil it for you! You can make up your own mind. Just read it!
The paperback cover is a little too flimsy. Otherwise, all is good.
The author doesn't explore the implications of the singularity for anyone outside of the western world, and spends little time exploring the potential risks and downsides (war, exploitation, or perhaps just a 'Terminator' style end of the world!). In fact, outside of the US was quite rare.
The 'dialogues' between people from different times were so cringe-worthy that I had to flick past these also.
In summary, interesting ideas, probably available elsewhere in a less annoying format!
I for one can't see why Kurzweil's main predictions are wrong.








