BookBrowse Reviews The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil

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The time when computer intelligence exceeds that of humans is near? Current Affairs/Science

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From the book jacket: The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is one of the best-known and controversial advocates for the role of machines in the future of humanity. In his latest foray into the future, he envisions an event—the "singularity"—in which technological change becomes so rapid and so profound that our bodies and brains will merge with our machines.
The Singularity Is Near portrays what life will be like after this event—a human-machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. In practical terms, this means that human aging and pollution will be reversed, world hunger will be solved, and our bodies and environment transformed by nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of biology, including death.
 
Comment: Amongst many other predictions Kurzweil makes (many of which sound like scenes from Asimov's Foundation and Robot books), he suggests that within a couple of decades our experiences will take place in virtual reality with our brains enhanced by nanotechnology, and by 2020 computers will be able to simulate a human well enough to fool an interrogator (a test known as the Turing Test after Alan Turing's 1950 paper).

The 'Singularity' to which Kurzweil refers is the predicted point when machine intelligence exceeds that of humans.  It appears that the term was coined by Vernor Vinge in a 1993 NASA lecture, in which he stated "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." 

Kurzweil does not predict that humanity will end as such, but that humanity as we know it will be replaced by new and improved models, living a life where war and famine are unheard of, where human brains can be reverse engineered and replicated and where single computers can process trillion times faster than every human brain on earth.  His predictions sound fantastical but he argues that he is simply extrapolating from where we are now assuming that progress continues at its present logarithmic rate. 

Kurzweil has no time for naysayers.  In the final chapters he presents some opposing arguments for the purpose of shooting them down like a row of cans on a wall - ping, ping, ping, and they're all knocked down.  Scientifically speaking, it seems conceivable that many, perhaps all his predictions will come to pass in time, but whether this will make us any happier as individuals, let alone as a species, I'm not so sure.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2006, and has been updated for the October 2006 edition. Click here to go to this issue.