The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

I remember several years ago telling people I had just subjected myself to the scariest book of my life after reading one about the supposedly inevitable nuclear implosion of Pakistan. Well, now I've found something that tops it, even though author Ray Kurzweil seems to imagine his book as a bolt of optimism. Anyone who has ever played around with the arithmetic of compounding and exponential growth knows how crazy the numbers get as growth feeds on itself. The phenomenon is quite real in the world, and it describes everything from viral epidemics to Warren Buffet's fortune. Kurzweil applies the exponential growth paradigm to the future of technology. He sees not only change itself accelerating, but the rate of change too, if you can go back to your high school calculus and wrap your mind around that stomach-churning concept. The math starts quickly approaching infinity, which is why it's so weird. "Singularity" is a common term-of-art among theoretical physicists, who apply it to a variety of seemingly irrational constructs, such as an infinitely large mass compressed towards an infinitely small point. Kurzweil co-opts the term for his own purpose here to mean the point in time where artificial intelligence starts exceeding human intelligence. Thereafter, it takes over its own programming and, being so powerful, does a better and better job of it. Because things are already moving so fast today, the accelerating rate of change means that Kurzweil's Singularity is closer than even optimists might imagine - hence the book's title. He projects it to occur somewhere in the middle of this century. Afterwards, nothing will ever again be the same. In physics, unimaginable things start happening at singularity points, like energy explosions within black holes. Following Kurzweil's Singularity, the most garish science fiction fantasies start becoming commonplace. The combination of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics - which he refers to collectively as GNR - will transform all aspects of human existence. He believes, for example, that nanobots released into a person's bloodstream, will facilitate a comprehensive (that is to say, 100%) map of that person, including genetic code and nervous system, that can be uploaded and downloaded at will onto new "substrates". In other words, robotic copies of human beings - body, mind, memories, and (one presumes) soul - can be made that will appear indistinguishable from the originals. And for that matter, those originals themselves can be re-shaped at will, giving us all the opportunity to become brilliant, strong, happy, and beautiful. Kurzweil tells us that artificial circuits replicating themselves at a molecular level will merge with the biological circuits that constitute our nervous systems, giving rise an "enhanced" human super-intelligence. Once this starts happening, what we now call the Internet will in effect become telepathic, giving these enhanced humans instantaneous access to all available knowledge and information as they fashion their brave new world. You see how explosive this gets? And it's just the beginning. Once the process gets underway, the evolving super-intelligence keeps expanding until it permeates the entire planet and, still accelerating, eventually the universe. Kurzweil suggests that movement though time-space "wormholes" should one day facilitate rapid travel beyond our own galaxy, taking the process literally everywhere. I realize that my amateur's survey of Kurzweil's thinking here makes him sound like a crank. However, let there be no mistake: he is an accomplished scientist and a highly sophisticated thinker. MIT-trained, he's an expert in artificial intelligence and has put his ideas into practice as a successful tech entrepreneur. Most of this book is not even devoted to prognostications, but to an in-depth review of research currently underway that lays the practical groundwork for virtually everything he talks about (except maybe the wormhole business). While he makes numerous leaps of faith in taking us from here to there, none of his forecasts represent sheer fantasy. He is an extremely good writer, and while staying true to what is in fact pretty complex science, describes it all in a way that makes it reasonably clear to lay readers. For all his hardcore materialism, Kurzweil also has a whimsical streak. Every 50 pages or so, he breaks up his text with imaginary light-hearted debates among himself (appearing as "Ray"), various historical figures - Darwin, Freud, etc. - and a person named "Molly", who seems to be a student. Molly is bright, curious, skeptical, and not in the least bit awed by Ray or the others. The thing about Molly is that she appears in two separate guises: Molly 2004 (the year this book was being written), and Molly 2104, which is of course well beyond the Singularity. One of Kurzweil's key forecasts is that future science will learn how to arrest and even reverse the aging process, allowing people more-or-less to live forever at whatever age they choose. So Molly has made it through the Singularity and returned as a still-young woman to speak about it from experience. Kurzweil is fully aware of the potential downside to his vision. He devotes one long chapter to what he calls "The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of GNR". He devotes another even longer chapter to responding to critics, who have attacked his ideas from every possible perspective. While he treats most criticisms respectfully, in the end he largely dismisses them all. One partial exception and the one specific fear he himself does seem to harbor is of self-replicating nanobots. He and other scientists who seriously debate such stuff even have a short-hand term for this specter: The Grey Goo Problem. Were self-replication somehow to spin out of control, Kurzweil explains to us that in a matter of days it could, in theory, consume the Earth's entire biomass and reduce it to "grey goo". This is indeed a troubling prospect, since this endangered biomass includes all of us. Interestingly, the cluster of criticisms that he responds to most gently are those arising from a spiritualist perspective. In one of his imaginary debates with "Molly", she repeatedly asks "Ray" if he believes in God. Ray surprises by dodging the question every time rather than saying no. Badgered into a corner, he finally avers: "For the sake of your question, we can consider God to be the universe, and I said that I believe in the universe." This sounds suspiciously like a yes, albeit with a twist. He then goes on to explain how his entire vision can be described as a picture of the universe "waking up" as enhanced human intelligence pervades its many corners. Religious people of an unorthodox bent might be tempted to embrace this image as God's self-realization. Fundamentalists of every stripe, however, were they to take K's cosmology seriously at all, would view it with disgust as the self-realization of God's Opposite Number. For me, the most unnerving question that this book triggers is who will control these accelerating technologies. Reading through many passages of the book, I found it hard not hard to be thinking about Nazi scientists beavering away at the design of their Master Race, or North Korean labs re-programming the neural patterns of citizens lacking enthusiasm for Kim Jong-Un. Kurzweil seems to trust in the pragmatic good will of the scientific community, buttressed by regulation. However, not all scientists have good will, and he says nothing about who he supposes will regulate the regulators. I also find it hard to see what joy or challenge there could be in a world where machines or enhanced humans dominate everything. People choosing not to become "enhanced" would either have it forced upon them or face life as a sub-species. The line between utopia and dystopia here is pretty fuzzy, and I find it a little scary that Kurzweil doesn't seem to care. Maybe I've seen too many science fiction movies. All that aside, I highly recommend this book. Decades ago when I was in college I used to describe about every other book I read as "changing my life", as we said in the day. Nowadays, no book changes my life, although the best ones still move the needle for me. Whether I like it or not, this one has me looking at things a little differently than I did before.

This book is dense and large. It is packed with references to many technological advances, especially in the area of computing, biology, nanotechnology and robotics. It has so much as one could use it for research purposes as it has a collection of references to so many articles and books. The book is large in both number of pages and area of human knowledge it covers. The reader should be prepared for a long read through philosophical concepts, theories, data, graphs and arguments against many supposed adversaries. The core concept of the book is based on an evolutionary view of the Universe. Ray believes there are six evolutionary epochs: physics and chemistry, biology and DNA, brains, technology, the merger of human technology with human intelligence and the wake up of the universe. The sixth epoch marks the occurrence of singularity, when everything is one universal intelligent medium. During this evolution the non-biological beings will slowly take over the biological creatures, in a progressive fashion, growing to new levels with far greater powers than ever achieved by the human race. A starting point for demonstrating this evolution is the theory of technology evolution and the law of accelerating returns. Ray demonstrates using well known data that advances in technology not only it will continue but it will accelerate. I found this part of the book very compelling. It is only when you look at aggregate historical data that you can see emerging a consistent picture of great change. In the next chapter, Achieving the Computational Capacity of the Human Brain, I found a few very interesting concepts. As it happens, I am interested in this area and I was familiar with many ideas, but I still felt overwhelmed by the details and references of computational theories that probably are more meaningful to PhD students. Some times the author goes into the rarefied field of physics, theories of Universe, time and speed of light. There is a lot challenging the conventional in the next chapter, Achieving the Software of Human Intelligence: How to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain. I was surprised to find out how many advances occurred in the brain science, neural modelling, prosthetics and the proliferation of artificial parts that replace more and more body parts, including areas of the nervous system. This is something that experiences an exponential growth and it should have a huge impact on health services and longevity. Ray Kurzweil dives with great aplomb into three major topics: genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (AI). These three chapters have so many arguments; they are so detailed and eloquent that I started loosing interest in the book. This is an area where the author misses the opportunity to strengthen the connection with the reader that was built in the previous chapters. The information is too dry, too mechanical as if it is copied from a popular science magazine. There is a lot of pressure on the reader to believe what is written there. Overall the style is so narrowly technological, with no attention paid to other aspects of human activities that it has the potential to push the reader into an antagonistic view. We are talking here about cloning, cell engineering, human cloning, nanobots in the bloodstream, artificial intelligence, robots and human society, etc. The author has not considered the aspect of poverty at all. I have not found a single consideration given to the problem of using the technology for the benefit of all people. I am talking here about practical aspects: how do you make the technology available to anyone, who will fund it, what happens if only a few people will have the ability to evolve into superhumans, etc. The last two chapters, The Deeply Intertwine Promise and Peril of GNR and Response to Critics, loose the rigour manifested in the first chapters and they have more the role of presenting arguments against critics. This part is a little bit tiring, I could not go through it in detail and it undoes a lot of good will built in the first part of the book. It talks about warfare, fundamentalism, etc and it uses a systematic classification of potential critics with appropriate responses to each of them. There is an absolute belief that the book and the concept could do no wrong and the future will be as described here. This is the part that I was less enthusiastic about. Overall the book is rich in concepts and information, it challenges the norm and it is very provocative from an intellectual point of view. I found it very interesting despite the tendency to be too combative and mechanical at times. The book is focused on technological aspect, missing on other dimensions that one would link to an evolutionary concept.

Ray Kurzweil is a national treasure, a man who thinks at the level of Einstein but only 50 years later. There are a number of people like Kurzweil walking around on the planet. You have to search for them. When you find them, try to learn everything you can from them. They will help you move exponentially to the next level. He is a solitary thinker, operating on the outer limits of human knowledge, and then some. I have read his other books, and in many ways, this book is the sequel to "The Age of Spiritual Machines". What Kurzweil is writing about in this book is his belief that we are moving towards s UNION if you will, of human intelligence and machines or objects that will have equal and eventually superior intelligence. Is this the goal of the people who spend their lives working in Artificial Intelligence, probably? The difference is that Kurzweil knows so much more than his fellow thinkers, and more importantly for us, he has the capacity to convey it to those of us who are not full-time players in his arena. This quality of information conveyance is a vastly underappreciated skill. In my work investing billions of dollars in stock investments, I have access to just about anybody I want, because I have the capacity to write a check. You have no idea how many actual geniuses I deal with who CAN'T speak, let alone write the English language. Kurzweil is different. He can get these concepts across to us in an interesting language spiced with stories that we can all understand. He does not visibly suffer from the ego needs of most geniuses. He is comfortable in his own skin, and that feeling is conveyed to us also. Due to his position in the exalted world of the super Mensa types, Kurzweil can also access the top minds of who's doing what in the world today. Men who run Fortune 100 companies are more than willing to share the knowledge of their research departments with this famous thinker. At the upper levels of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Department are some of the smartest people on the planet working on Artificial Intelligence, and edge-of-knowledge sophisticated computer applications. Kurzweil is in a position to interact with all of them, and this accounts for why much of what he writes about appears nowhere else. He also brings something else to the table. He is a very successful inventor and entrepreneur who is now independently wealthy. He knows what works in what environment, and what doesn't. He knows when something is being brought to market too early, or way too late. In the book he states, "I realized that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can't get them to work, but because the timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment." I am an investor; I have never heard it said better. His concept of his "intuitive linear view of history" is absolutely fascinating, and compelling. He believes that the rate of change is accelerating. For years we have all heard the concept that the only constant is change. Kurzweil believes the calculus is changing. We have already entered a world where we are witnessing a dramatic change in the rate of acceleration of change. Just ten or so years ago, cell phones had minimal impact. The Internet was nowhere near the adaptive state it is in today, and universal information flow did not exist. There were no bloggers, traditional media dominated, and people were more easily lied to by politicians with impunity. Things are changing aren't they? Here's the bottom line on Kurzweil. Most of the time you read a book to take one major thought out of the document. Sometimes it's a single page; sometimes it's a single line. Occasionally, you find that rare book where there is something on every page that is outstanding, motivating, even framework changing. This is such a book, and therein lays its importance. There's one more reason to read a book like this. Do you remember when Ross Perot ran for President? One of the metaphors he used to refer to was a story of the carpenter he knew. The words were "Measure twice, cut once." This is an example of what I call the need to be mentored. There are people that can teach you things that if you spent 20 years studying the topic, you would never learn. The carpenters' of "Measure twice, cut once," is an example of that. When you read Kurzweil, you are eliminating the need to read hundreds to thousands of other books. There is knowledge on every page for you to absorb and ponder. Buy this book, and have an orgasm of the mind. Richard Stoyeck

Good evening. You may know me as the genial, white-haired book reviewer, but I once had a secret identity. I was Doctor D. Filed, the mad scientist, and my job was to introduce children to "the future," around when they were nine years old. You may remember "the future." We would zoom round the galaxy, meeting alien races, living forever, and having robot computers that were smarter than we are. However, all this would happen many years from now, and our great-great-grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren might catch a little glimpse of it. Otherwise the future we ourselves encountered would be just like today, only more so. However, Ray Kurzweil has been doing the math on those last two things, and he has a revised date for when we'll be immortal and have super-smart computers. And his date is . . . 2045. That's right, the year 2045, thirty-five years from now, less than half a lifetime. That means that more than half the people alive today will see that date. And don't take that to be some wishful thinking. Kurzweil has extrapolated the rate of change in technology and biology to arrive at that date. He points out that these technologies improve exponentially. That means that if our technology knowledge doubles every year, we are not going to see twenty times the knowledge in a decade, but two multiplied by itself ten times, or over a thousand times. Kurzweil quotes the Human Genome Project, which after seven years of a fifteen-year process, had completed one percent of its work. However, it finished on time, because technology improved all through that period. His work is meticulously sourced, with many a footnote reference. His charts show that over and over again knowledge takes an exponential course. EDIT: I read recently of a human genome being read in four weeks, and today I hear of someone who did it in a week. Exponential enough for ya? EDIT of EDIT:An ex-ICU nurse told me today (9/9/09) that someone who nursed in an ICU as little as three years ago would have to go through months of training to get up to speed on ICU changes since then. AND THE LAST EDIT: "Complete Genomics has completed 14 genomes since March (20 human genomes in the world have been published), priced at $5000, and aims to complete 10,000 genomes by the end of 2010." (also 9/9/09, still less than twenty years since the first mapping.) He believes that "the singularity," no matter how far away it seems today, will be here on time. This will mean that some technologies will reach their limits, but new technologies will arise before they're needed. The history of computer technology certainly bears him out. Equally biology is helping us understand the brain, so its re-creation in software is likely to happen. You might think that there is too much to learn about the brain, but it's a reasonably simple machine with complex ways of doing things. So let's just concentrate on the higher powers, rather than reconstructing neurons. To give you an example, for more than a hundred years we have been able to fly. We've had birds around us all through human history, but we didn't copy them. Pretty much all our development has been with fixed- and rotating-wing aircraft being pulled through the air. Our "non-bird" flying has made us superior to birds, but we also have to get up there and come down safely. Hence a non-neuron brain, provided that it works at a higher level, can replace an incredibly complex series of cells. Kurzweil believes that we'll see advances in GNR, or Genetics, Nanotechnologies, and Robotics. Our DNA will be transformed to make us unable to catch major diseases, we'll have tiny machines inside our bloodstream, and these machines will improve our health from within. The day before I wrote this I read of "bacteria-based computing," and we're already capable of putting together tiny machines atom by atom, so it's not far away. Where does that leave us? Don't look at me - my white hair is a result of being born in World War II. I won't see the singularity - but you might. Many people try to believe that it will never happen as soon as Kurzweil says - but that's like going out in a thunderstorm "because hardly anybody gets killed by lightning." The day will come, because "Objects seen in the future are closer than they appear." When those things happen it will cause a major disruptive force. Some understanding of what's to come makes us more able to judge these technologies when they occur. An unprepared population is likely to be panicked into making a wrong choice. I'm sure your reaction to this news was a kind of fear - when something needs fixing that you thought was OK. Kinda like your first reaction to Global Climate Change. But just as we recognized and now are doing something toward fixing Global Warming, so we can recognize this and discuss it. It's obviously a far bigger problem, but even if the projections are off it's still likely to occur. Most people don't realize that there are more embedded computers than people in the world - chips that run your remote control, your car, and your dishwasher. We are so used to them we don't even know that they are there. Some criticisms of this book are that it's repetitive, but Kurzweil has to show that everything points to it. His background is impeccable, but I wouldn't take dozens of pills as he does, but then I've given up living long enough to see The Singularity. I applaud him for not making the book into some kind of horror story, and his apparent optimism is simply explaining that the process will happen, and there are enough good things to look forward to dealing with it. You may agree with Kurzweil or you may not, but at least you'll know that there is an issue coming up that you'll probably have to deal with. Parts of it may seem unlikely to happen, but you're reading this on a system that has just about all the knowledge in the world, and the half human/half computers will have direct access to it. In fact, we'll invent the last machine we need - the "inventing machine," which will be like the "mathematic machine" we call a computer, but it will invent new things and even improve itself. So don't laugh at the white-haired book reviewer - in the late twenty-first century, and the twenty-second century, and the twenty-third century, this could be you, telling the youngsters how unlimited knowledge and life was once a figment of people's imaginations. And if you have the slightest interest in this subject, buy this book. In 1975 - thirty-five years before now, imagine a book that told you what life would be like in 2010 - Communism crushed, a computer in just about every home, and all the knowledge in the world on tap. This book is far more important than the 1975 book, and I'll bet you wished you'd read the 1975 book and made a few wise investments. But "The Singularity Is Near" will prepare you for a major coming crisis, and you'd better be prepared.

The Singularity is Near is one of the most audacious books I have ever read outside of religious texts. I mean audacious in a positive manner, in terms of the scope of material covered, the command of technical detail and inspired vision of the future. For a relative small price to pay, the reader is invited on a mind-blowing journey of what is possible in the near future, due to the relentless and overpowering reach and march of technology, and an extrapolation of where that journey is taking us. Glimpses of that extrapolation can be seen even now. Bottomline, Kurzweil explains in fairly understandable detail where the exponential growth in computer processing, microelectronic and medical advancements are taking us and the book is as much a warning for humans to get ready for the future as an inspired vision. By 2045 Kurzweil predicts the Singularity will occur; that is, humans will transcend biology, i.e. we will no longer be fully human but will be "part man/woman and part machine" or cyborg in other words. The implications are not grasped by many Kurzweil implies but he attempts to prove by extrapolation from Moore's Law and the Turing Test how that might occur. Kurzweil contends that once the Singularity is achieved, humanity will be off to the races in terms of growth potential since human intelligence will be digitized and can be uploaded, downloaded, and interchanged much like computers operate today and the human body will be increasingly machine-like as organs will become passe'. The book is an intellectual feast whether one agrees with Kurzweil or not. There are great discussions as to when computers will become indistinguishable versus humans (Turing Test), a calculation of the computing power of a rock (yes, you read correctly) and a romp in the calculation of the likely number of intelligent civilizations in the universe (Kurzweil thinks there is only one and it happens to be us) using the Drake Equation where he explains his assumptions in each variable. The latter exposition is the single best discussion I have ever read anywhere (Sagan et al)on the issue of intelligent life potential in the universe. If nothing else, the book is dynamite to any serious reader who likes to ponder the future and technological change. The downside for many readers will be Kurzweil's atheistic approach which views humanity as souless organisms and an unrealistic view that the bulk of current humanity could ever reach the potential he describes. As a Christian I don't take offense at Kurzweil's thesis, however, because the Bible argues that humanity only reaches full potential in Christ, otherwise humanistic approaches devolve into evil whether abetted by technology or not. Kurzweil is only focusing on the humanistic approach and he doesn't believe (his opinion) that the trends he is discussing will progress toward evil or cause ever more chaos in the world. That perhaps is a very tall stretch when considering the shape of our world today. Notwithstanding, I can accept Kurzweil's thesis without offense because it is one man's opinion versus that of many others. I can thank him, though, that his projections are as much a warning as to where technology can be taking us and the scientific community is not preparing the rest of us very well on that subject. Objectively, one should appreciate the brilliance of Kurzweil, his command of technical issues and his sheer attempt at depicting such a theme in the first place. Truly audacious.

To say that Mr. Kurzweil is a bit of an optimist is like saying Shaq is a bit on the tall side. Mr K is positively bubbling with enthusiasim. Had it not been taken by Joe Namath a suitable title might have been "The Future's So Bright I Just Gotta Wear Shades". But therein lies the problem. Mr K comes across more like a passionate evangelical than a reasoned scientist. Whenever someone is absolutley convinced about the rightness of his assumptions I become skeptical. If you're reading this you know the premise of the book. Mr. K maintains that the pace of technological change (and by technology he means the really cool technologies, like infotech, biotech, and nanotech) is not simply increasing, but increasing exponentially, so fast that we will soon reach a point where man and machine have become one, and are brains are a million (or maybe a billion) times more powerful. When this happens everything we know will have changed forever. Moreover, this is not someting that will happen at some vague time in the far future. It's just around the corner. Mr. K even gives us a date: 2045. While reading the book I kept thinking, What if Mr. K had written this in the mid 1950's? Certainly he'd have backup for his basic premise--the changes that occured in the first half of the 20th century were indeed tremendous. Take aviation, a hot technology in those days. Mr. K would no doubt have observed that we went from Kitty Hawk to the Boeing 707 in just 50 years. Projecting ahead, Mr. K would have concluded that the second half of the century would see an even greater rate of advancement, so that by now we'd all have our own personal flying devices, zipping off to Europe in just minutes. But that hasn't happened. Certainly there has been signigicant progress in aviation in the last 50 years, but not like the 50 years before that. In some says it's worse. I suspect that since 9/11 the time it takes to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco (from the time you get to one airport to the time you leave the other) may be longer now than it was in the 1950's. Why has this happened? A lot of this has to do with social conditions, not technological ones. Supersonic trasport never got off the ground (so to speak) in part because people didn't want the sonic booms near populated areas. These same social factors may well put the brakes on a lot of what Mr. K predicts. It's not that Mr. K's book isn't based on hard science. It's positively larded with science, so much so that my eyes tended to glaze over many times. It's just that he doesn't seem very critical. While he does acknowledge the existence of contrary opinion, he quickly (albeit politely) dismisses any cautionary thoughts. Those who disagree with his beliefs are clearly stuck-in-the-mud, nay-saying Luddites. Mr K is obviously a brilliant, well-informed scientist. I don't have enough knowledge to judge the accuracy of his facts, except in a few situations. When that does occur, though, I become unimpressed. For example, he spends a few pages talking about the increases that have occured in life expectancy, and uses this to project further increases to 150 years and then to 500 years. But he fails to distinguish between life exoectancy and life span. The former has indeed increased, but the latter has not. I am certain Mr. K knows the difference. His failure to make the distinction is misleading and disingenuous. It makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the book. As to the book itself, it's far too long. He repeats his points so much it seems as though he thinks that by mere repetition the reader will become more convinced that he's right. And some parts of the book are simply annoying, like the smug pseudo-conversations among past, present, and future personages that appear throughout the work. To his credit, though, his optimisim about the future is refreshing, and certainly an antidote to the dystopian views typical in literature and Hollywood (Brave New World, 1984, Blade Runner, Mad Max, The Terminator, Waterworld, etc.). The bottom line here is that Mr. K. doesn't seem to remember that virtually all predictions about the future are wrong, since the predictions are simply extrapolations of current trends. The future is never what we think it will be, and Mr. K is no exception. Then again, he could be right. If so, I just hope I can live long enough to enjoy the sigularity, so I can have my body filled with nanobots and my brain uploaded to (as he would say) a suitable substrate. Maybe being a cyborg won't be so bad.

Ray Kurzweil is without question one of the greatest technologists of our era and his ideas should command respect. That does not necessarily mean that all of them are correct. Kurzweil's latest book is a brilliant exposition of one possible future for the human species. As an intellectual adventure it is in the same league with Brian Green's books on string theory and Steven Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". If you enjoy reading Scientific American you can handle Kurzweil. If Discovery magazine is closer to your speed, a more accessible book is "Radical Evolution" by Joel Garreau. People who read books like these basically fall into two groups, those primarily interested in current trends in science and those primarily interested in the future of humanity. Kurzweil attempts to explain both the explosive development of genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology (GRN) and the profound implications these have for the future of our species. The book is worth buying just for its stunning exposition of current trends in GRN.(Actually Garreau's GRIN, for Genetics, Robotics, Information, and Nanotechnology, is a more accurate and therefore better acronym). Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, Kurzweil does not adequately take into account events external to the world of technology that could and probably will completely derail his predictions about both GRN and humanity's future. In that sense Kurzweil falls victim to the very same `linear thinking' that he decries in others who forecast the future. The term `singularity' as used by Kurzweil means the transformation of Homo Sapiens from a slowly evolving biological species to a race of super intelligent beings no longer constrained by the limitations of biology. This transformation will be the result of the confluence of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics and will occur sometime around 2045. Descendants of Homo Sapiens live forever because the aging process has been halted. All of the world's economic and social problems disappear because all the baggage of biological evolution (species competition for limited resources, sex, aggression, territorial defense, etc.) vanishes. There is little need to work because intelligent machines do it all, even repairing and replacing themselves when they fail or wear out. The new super beings spend most of their time exploring ever deeper mysteries of the universe. Kurzweil backs up his extraordinary claims with a wealth of convincing data, in itself a significant contribution, but more important and the reason this book is worth reading, is his exposition of how this confluence could take place. Kurzweil believes firmly it will take place and this is where his linear thinking intrudes. By linear thinking I mean the idea that tomorrow's technological advancement will follow along the same smoothly upward flowing line that it followed today and yesterday and the day before. If the progress Kurzweil projects for the next four decades were to be compressed into the next five or at most ten years then his forecast could very well turn out to be correct. But in this reviewer's opinion far more powerful and immediate societal forces are at work that will result in a major discontinuity, either natural or manmade. By discontinuity I mean a collapse of the world economy most likely brought about by terrorist related political and military strife followed by widespread anarchy, certainly lasting many decades and possibly much longer. The GRN technologies are not for backyard inventors working in their garages. They are extremely complex, requiring vast financial, physical, organizational, and intellectual resources. Kurzweil's path to the future depends on a smoothly flowing, surprise free world for the next forty years. Can any thoughtful person reading a newspaper today possibly believe this? Let N equal the number of Muslims in the world today, roughly one billion. Let N divided by 1,000 (i.e., one tenth of one percent) equal the number of fundamentalist Muslims committed to die for Allah to destroy western civilization. Do the math and that works out to 1,000,000 suicide bombers coming at us daily for the next forty years. Nineteen high school graduates crashed some planes into a couple of buildings in New York and one in Washington, killed three thousand people, and caused a Trillion dollars in damage to the American economy. Someday the attack will biological or nuclear. It will kill 30,000 or 300,000 or even 3,000,000. No one will know for sure if another is not soon to follow, and another. Uncontrollable mass panic will reign. This civilization risks collapse not because of the buildings destroyed or the numbers killed but because of its extreme fragility due to excessive system interdependence. The collapse could possibly be avoided but the changes required would be profound. It would require too radical a paradigm shift for global elites who cling to the system as it is now. Kurzweil himself acknowledges that terrorism is the most likely scenario that would prevent the Singularity yet he admits that he has no solution for it. I would recommend that he read "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond, and "The Long Emergency" by James Howard Kunstler. While these also have some problems in their arguments they point us in the right direction. It would be interesting to see how one of the world's truly great visionaries incorporates the ideas contained in those books into a revised edition of "The Singularity". Civilizations rise and fall. There is no reason to believe that ours is somehow immune to this cycle. One may completely reject the apocalyptic beliefs of fundamentalist Christians, the earth changes of New Agers, and the psychic prognostications of the supermarket tabloids, and still recognize the warning signs that the current civilization cycle may well be nearing an end. This should not be a cause for despair but rather for hope. At some point a new cycle will begin. Kurzweil's singularity is a cautionary vision of where that next cycle may take us. We do not know with certainty but the evidence is mounting that probably there are many intelligent species in the universe. Some of them must have progressed beyond our level of development with all its dangers. All we have to do is figure out how they did it.

The author is definitely one of the most inspiring of all researchers in the field of applied artificial intelligence. For those, such as this reviewer, who are working "in the trenches" of applied AI, his website is better than morning coffee. One does not have to agree with all the conclusions reached by the author in order to enjoy this book, but he does make a good case, albeit somewhat qualitative, for the occurrence, in this century, of what he and other futurists have called a `technological singularity.' He defines this as a period in the future where the rate of technological change will be so high that human life will be `irreversibly transformed.' There is much debate about this notion in the popular literature on AI, but in scientific and academic circles it has been greeted with mixed reviews. Such skepticism in the latter is expected and justified, for scientists and academic researchers need more quantitative justification than is usually provided by the enthusiasts of the singularity, which in this book the author calls "singularitarians." Even more interesting though is that the notion of rapid technological change seems to be ignored by the business community, who actually stand to gain (or lose) the most by it. Since this book is aimed primarily at a wide audience, and not professional researchers, the author does not include detailed arguments or definitions for the notion of machine intelligence or a list of the hundreds of examples of intelligent machines that are now working in the field. Indeed, if one were to include a discussion of each of these examples, this book would swell to thousands of pages. There are machines right now used in business and industry that can manage, troubleshoot, and analyze networks, diagnose illnesses, compose music definitely worth listening to, choreograph dances, simulate human behavior in computer games, recommend and engage in financial transactions and bargaining, and many, many other tasks, a detailed list of which would, again, entail many thousands of pages. There are various psychological issues that arise when discussing machine intelligence, which if believed might prohibit the acceptance of any kind of notion of a technological singularity. For example, it is one of the historical peculiarities of research in AI that advances in the field are later trivialized, i.e. when a problem in AI becomes solved it no longer holds any mystery and is then considered to be just another part of information processing. It is then no longer regarded as `intelligent' in any sense of the term. This phenomenon in AI research might be called the "Michie-McCorduck-Hofstader effect", named after the three individuals, Donald Michie, Barbara McCorduck, and Douglas Hofstader, who discussed it some detail in their writings. If one examines the history of AI, one finds many examples of this effect, such as in knowledge discovery from databases, the use of business rules in database technologies, and the use of ontologies for information systems development. One of the best examples of this effect though is the backgammon player TD-Gammon, a highly sophisticated example of machine intelligence but which is now considered to be merely part of the "programmer's toolbox." The Michie-McCorduck-Hofstader effect is important in discussing the notion of a technological singularity since if one does occur this effect would diminish one's ability to recognize it as being real. The author does not name this phenomenon as such in the book, but a reading of it definitely reveals that he is aware of the skepticism expressed by many towards any "advances" in machine intelligence. Another one of these psychological issues regards the attitude of many philosophers on the notion of machine intelligence. In most cases they are extremely skeptical, and many AI researchers seem to feel the need to "refute" their opinions on the "impossibility" of intelligent machines. Unfortunately the author is one of these, and devotes space in the book to counter various philosophical arguments against AI. His arguments, although valid, are really a waste of time though. Such time would be better spent, both for the author and for AI researchers, in the actual development of intelligent machines. A moratorium should be declared among AI researchers on all philosophical speculation. Such musings are best left to professional philosophers, who have the time and the inclination to indulge themselves in them. There are other issues that should have been given more attention in the book, such as more details on the energy requirements needed to bring about such a singularity. In addition, the author needs to sharpen just what he means by intelligence and move away from the Turing test/human brain benchmark that he uses in the book. There are many examples of intelligence in the natural world, and these can and have been emulated in many different types of machines. Interestingly, the fixation on human intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain (that is exemplified in this book) has inspired a few research teams to attempt to build a machine of "general intelligence", i.e. one that can think in many different domains, as clearly humans can. But it is still an open question whether this intelligence is "entangled" over these domains, i.e. whether or not a decrease in ability in one domain will affect the ability in another. From an evolutionary or efficiency standpoint it would seem that that domain specific intelligence is more optimal. The notion of a technological singularity can be met with both exhilaration and a sense of foreboding, since (radical) change can be embraced with enthusiasm and with some feelings of anxiety. Even the author expresses this when he writes in the book that he is not "entirely comfortable" with all the consequences of a technological singularity. He has though made a fairly strong case for rapidly accelerating change. If the book concentrated more on the actual examples of intelligent machines and included the enormous amount of data from activities in applied AI that are now going on, an even stronger case could be made.

Muy interesante, el autor conoce de muchos temas.

Looks like the author did his research very well! Some are tech related and very detailed. So those that like to know that will find it interesting and informative. I liked it even though too much tech but Ok the other information that follows in later chapters is worth the read! Unfathomable that society would go that far but not impossible that some will. I certainly do not want to live immortally. It would seem that feelings and personality would disappear eventually if out of hand with this replacement parts and so on? A bit extreme if it continues to upgrade in the far future like he suggests. it begs the question : when does a Human no longer a Human being"?

Work of art. Except for the sections on Neuroscience and the chapters detailing the present day innovations of 2005. This book is a classic and will be revered in the coming decades.

Fabulous

Ray Kurzweil isn't renowned for his authoring talents and is better known for his inventions. I remember many years ago owning a copy of Kerzweil's voice recognition program (I forget the exact title) and being impressed with its accuracy. Kerzweil is also renowned for his work in digital music and a vast array of other fields. 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.