3.5
The Singularity Is Near
ByPublisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development.
“Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times
“Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.
While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
“Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times
“Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.
While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Singularity Is Near Reviews
3.5
“Summarized in one word: nanobots”
“This one is hard to rate given it tried to predict the future 20 years from 2005. I’m a technoptimist. It’s easy to look back and criticize where the author was incorrect. The author is correct in his predictions around AI and having something magical by the end of 2020s. But off in just about everything else. Moores law has slowed down because chips can’t get much smaller, there are no nanobots, advances in medicine aren’t that advanced, our understanding of the brain and consciousness isn’t that much better. Some of the things he says feel prophetic and the others the ravings of a mad man.
It’s also interesting that he gave positive reviews of our ability to contain the SARS virus, but 17 years later we totally fumble Covid.”
About Ray Kurzweil
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 more than six decades—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 books including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind, both New York Times bestsellers, and Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.
Other books by Ray Kurzweil
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