The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI - Paperback

by Ray Kurzweil (Author)

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF TIME'S 100 MOST INFLUENTUAL PEOPLE IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The noted inventor and futurist's successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come

Since it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near and its vision of an exponential future have spawned a worldwide movement. Kurzweil's predictions about technological advancements have largely come true, with concepts like AI, intelligent machines, and biotechnology now widely familiar to the public.

In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances toward the Singularity--assessing his 1999 prediction that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and examining the exponential growth of technology--that, in the near future, will expand human intelligence a millionfold and change human life forever. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world, atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by connecting our brains to the cloud; how exponential technologies are propelling innovation forward in all industries and improving all aspects of our well-being such as declining poverty and violence; and the growth of renewable energy and 3-D printing. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics of current controversy as how AI will impact employment and the safety of autonomous cars, and "After Life" technology, which aims to virtually revive deceased individuals through a combination of their data and DNA.

The culmination of six decades of research on artificial intelligence, The Singularity Is Nearer is Ray Kurzweil's crowning contribution to the story of this science and the revolution that is to come.

Author Biography

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 sixty-one years―longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, the print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the text-to-speech synthesizer, the music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a GRAMMY(R) 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 bestselling books including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.