The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil (English)

Description: The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil In his latest, thrilling foray into the future, a great inventor and futurist envisions an event--the "singularity"--in which technological change becomes so rapid and so profound that human bodies and brains will merge with machines. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher 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. 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 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. Review Praise for The Singularity Is NearOne of CBS Newss Best Fall Books of 2005 • Among St Louis Post-Dispatchs Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 • One of Amazon.coms Best Science Books of 2005"Anyone can grasp Mr. Kurzweils main idea: that mankinds technological knowledge has been snowballing, with dizzying prospects for the future. The basics are clearly expressed. But for those more knowledgeable and inquisitive, the author argues his case in fascinating detail . . . . The Singularity Is Near is startling in scope and bravado."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times"Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world." —Los Angeles Times "Elaborate, smart and persuasive." —The Boston Globe "A pleasure to read." —The Wall Street Journal"Filled with imaginative, scientifically grounded speculation . . . . The Singularity Is Near is worth reading just for its wealth of information, all lucidly presented . . . . [Its] an important book. Not everything that Kurzweil predicts may come to pass, but a lot of it will, and even if you dont agree with everything he says, its all worth paying attention to."—The Philadelphia Inquirer"[An] exhilarating and terrifyingly deep look at where we are headed as a species . . . . Mr. Kurzweil is a brilliant scientist and futurist, and he makes a compelling and, indeed, a very moving case for his view of the future."—The New York Sun"Compelling."—San Jose Mercury News"Kurzweil links a projected ascendance of artificial intelligence to the future of the evolutionary process itself. The result is both frightening and enlightening . . . . The Singularity Is Near is a kind of encyclopedic map of what Bill Gates once called the road ahead."—The Oregonian"A clear-eyed, sharply-focused vision of the not-so-distant future."—The Baltimore Sun"This book offers three things that will make it a seminal document. 1) It brokers a new idea, not widely known, 2) The idea is about as big as you can get: the Singularity—all the change in the last million years will be superceded by the change in the next five minutes, and 3) It is an idea that demands informed response. The books claims are so footnoted, documented, graphed, argued, and plausible in small detail, that it requires the equal in response. Yet its claims are so outrageous that if true, it would mean . . . well . . . the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of utopia. Ray Kurzweil has taken all the strands of the Singularity meme circulating in the last decades and has united them into a single tome which he has nailed on our front door. I suspect this will be one of the most cited books of the decade. Like Paul Ehrlichs upsetting 1972 book Population Bomb, fan or foe, its the wave at epicenter you have to start with."—Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired"Really, really out there. Delightfully so."—Businessweek.com"Stunning, utopian vision of the near future when machine intelligence outpaces the biological brain and what things may look like when that happens . . . . Approachable and engaging."—the unofficial Microsoft blog"One of the most important thinkers of our time, Kurzweil has followed up his earlier works . . . with a work of startling breadth and audacious scope."—newmediamusings.com"An attractive picture of a plausible future."—Kirkus Reviews"Kurzweil is a true scientist—a large-minded one at that . . . . Whats arresting isnt the degree to which Kurzweils heady and bracing vision fails to convince—given the scope of his projections, thats inevitable—but the degree to which it seems downright plausible."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)"[T]hroughout this tour de force of boundless technological optimism, one is impressed by the authors adamantine intellectual integrity . . . . If you are at all interested in the evolution of technology in this century and its consequences for the humans who are creating it, this is certainly a book you should read."—John Walker, inventor of Autodesk, in Fourmilab Change Log"Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations—transforming our lives in ways we cant yet imagine."—Bill Gates"If you have ever wondered about the nature and impact of the next profound discontinuities that will fundamentally change the way we live, work, and perceive our world, read this book. Kurzweils Singularity is a tour de force, imagining the unimaginable and eloquently exploring the coming disruptive events that will alter our fundamental perspectives as significantly as did electricity and the computer."—Dean Kamen, recipient of the National Medal of Technology, physicist, and inventor of the first wearable insulin pump, the HomeChoice portable dialysis machine, the IBOT Mobility System, and the Segway Human Transporter"One of our leading AI practitioners, Ray Kurzweil, has once again created a must read book for anyone interested in the future of science, the social impact of technology, and indeed the future of our species. His thought-provoking book envisages a future in which we transcend our biological limitations, while making a compelling case that a human civilization with superhuman capabilities is closer at hand than most people realize."—Raj Reddy, founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and recipient of the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery"Rays optimistic book well merits both reading and thoughtful response. For those like myself whose views differ from Rays on the balance of promise and peril, The Singularity Is Near is a clear call for a continuing dialogue to address the greater concerns arising from these accelerating possibilities."—Bill Joy, cofounder and former chief scientist, Sun Microsystems Review Quote The best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence (Bill Gates) Excerpt from Book RAY KURZWEIL The Singularity Is Near WHEN HUMANS TRANSCEND BIOLOGY PENGUIN BOOKS PROLOGUE The Power of Ideas I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. --NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT At the age of five, I had the idea that I would become an inventor. I had the notion that inventions could change the world. When other kids were wondering aloud what they wanted to be, I already had the conceit that I knew what I was going to be. The rocket ship to the moon that I was then building (almost a decade before President Kennedys challenge to the nation) did not work out. But at around the time I turned eight, my inventions became a little more realistic, such as a robotic theater with mechanical linkages that could move scenery and characters in and out of view, and virtual baseball games. Having fled the Holocaust, my parents, both artists, wanted a more worldly, less provincial, religious upbringing for me.1 My spiritual education, as a result, took place in a Unitarian church. We would spend six months studying one religion--going to its services, reading its books, having dialogues with its leaders--and then move on to the next. The theme was "many paths to the truth." I noticed, of course, many parallels among the worlds religious traditions, but even the inconsistencies were illuminating. It became clear to me that the basic truths were profound enough to transcend apparent contradictions. At the age of eight, I discovered the Tom Swift Jr. series of books. The plots of all of the thirty-three books (only nine of which had been published when I started to read them in 1956) were always the same: Tom would get himself into a terrible predicament, in which his fate and that of his friends, and often the rest of the human race, hung in the balance. Tom would retreat to his basement lab and think about how to solve the problem. This, then, was the dramatic tension in each book in the series: what ingenious idea would Tom and his friends come up with to save the day?2 The moral of these tales was simple: the right idea had the power to overcome a seemingly overwhelming challenge. To this day, I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandaries we face--business problems, health issues, relationship difficulties, as well as the great scientific, social, and cultural challenges of our time--there is an idea that can enable us to prevail. Furthermore, we can find that idea. And when we find it, we need to implement it. My life has been shaped by this imperative. The power of an idea--this is itself an idea. Around the same time that I was reading the Tom Swift Jr. series, I recall my grandfather, who had also fled Europe with my mother, coming back from his first return visit to Europe with two key memories. One was the gracious treatment he received from the Austrians and Germans, the same people who had forced him to flee in 1938. The other was a rare opportunity he had been given to touch with his own hands some original manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci. Both recollections influenced me, but the latter is one Ive returned to many times. He described the experience with reverence, as if he had touched the work of God himself. This, then, was the religion that I was raised with: veneration for human creativity and the power of ideas. In 1960, at the age of twelve, I discovered the computer and became fascinated with its ability to model and re-create the world. I hung around the surplus electronics stores on Canal Street in Manhattan (theyre still there!) and gathered parts to build my own computational devices. During the 1960s, I was as absorbed in the contemporary musical, cultural, and political movements as my peers, but I became equally engaged in a much more obscure trend: namely, the remarkable sequence of machines that IBM proffered during that decade, from their big "7000" series (7070, 7074, 7090, 7094) to their small 1620, effectively the first "minicomputer." The machines were introduced at yearly intervals, and each one was less expensive and more powerful than the last, a phenomenon familiar today. I got access to an IBM 1620 and began to write programs for statistical analysis and subsequently for music composition. I still recall the time in 1968 when I was allowed into the secure, cavernous chamber housing what was then the most powerful computer in New England, a top-of-the-line IBM 360 Model 91, with a remarkable million bytes (one megabyte) of "core" memory, an impressive speed of one million instructions per second (one MIPS), and a rental cost of only one thousand dollars per hour. I had developed a computer program that matched high-school students to colleges, and I watched in fascination as the front-panel lights danced through a distinctive pattern as the machine processed each students application.3 Even though I was quite familiar with every line of code, it nonetheless seemed as if the computer were deep in thought when the lights dimmed for several seconds at the denouement of each such cycle. Indeed, it could do flawlessly in ten seconds what took us ten hours to do manually with far less accuracy. As an inventor in the 1970s, I came to realize that my inventions needed to make sense in terms of the enabling technologies and market forces that would exist when the inventions were introduced, as that world would be a very different one from the one in which they were conceived. I began to develop models of how distinct technologies--electronics, communications, computer processors, memory, magnetic storage, and others--developed and how these changes rippled through markets and ultimately our social institutions. I realized that most inventions fail not because the R&D department cant 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. My interest in technology trends and their implications took on a life of its own in the 1980s, and I began to use my models to project and anticipate future technologies, innovations that would appear in 2000, 2010, 2020, and beyond. This enabled me to invent with the capabilities of the future by conceiving and designing inventions using these future capabilities. In the mid-to-late 1980s, I wrote my first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines .4 It included extensive (and reasonably accurate) predictions for the 1990s and 2000s, and ended with the specter of machine intelligence becoming indistinguishable from that of its human progenitors within the first half of the twenty-first century. It seemed like a poignant conclusion, and in any event I personally found it difficult to look beyond so transforming an outcome. Over the last twenty years, I have come to appreciate an important meta-idea: that the power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating. Although people readily agree with this observation when it is simply stated, relatively few observers truly appreciate its profound implications. Within the next several decades, we will have the opportunity to apply ideas to conquer age-old problems--and introduce a few new problems along the way. During the 1990s, I gathered empirical data on the apparent acceleration of all information-related technologies and sought to refine the mathematical models underlying these observations. I developed a theory I call the law of accelerating returns, which explains why technology and evolutionary processes in general progress in an exponential fashion.5 In The Age of Spiritual Machines (ASM) , which I wrote in 1998, I sought to articulate the nature of human life as it would exist past the point when machine and human cognition blurred. Indeed, Ive seen this epoch as an increasingly intimate collaboration between our biological heritage and a future that transcends biology. Since the publication of ASM , I have begun to reflect on the future of our civilization and its relationship to our place in the universe. Although it may seem difficult to envision the capabilities of a future civilization whose intelligence vastly outstrips our own, our ability to create models of reality in our mind enables us to articulate meaningful insights into the implications of this impending merger of our biological thinking with the nonbiological intelligence we are creating. This, then, is the story I wish to tell in this book. The story is predicated on the idea that we have the ability to understand our own intelligence--to access our own source code, if you will--and then revise and expand it. Some observers question whether we are capable of applying our own thinking to understand our own thinking. AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter muses that "it could be simply an accident of fate that our brains are too weak to understand themselves. Think of the lowly giraffe, for instance, whose brain is obviously far below the level required for self-understanding--yet it is remarkably similar to our brain."6 However, we have already succeeded in modeling portions of our brain--neurons and substantial neural regions--and the complexity of such models is growing rapidly. Our progress in reverse engineering the human brain, a key issue that I will describe in detail in this book, demonstrates that we do indeed have the ability to understand, to model, and to extend our own intelligence. This is one aspect of the uniqueness of our species: our intelligence is just sufficiently above the critical threshold necessary for us to scale our own ability to unrestricted heights of creative power--and we have the opposable appendage (our thumbs) necessary Details ISBN0143037889 Author Ray Kurzweil Short Title SINGULARITY IS NEAR Language English ISBN-10 0143037889 ISBN-13 9780143037880 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 153.9 Illustrations Yes Year 2006 Residence Waltham, MA, US Subtitle When Humans Transcend Biology DOI 10.1604/9780143037880 Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2006-09-26 NZ Release Date 2006-09-26 US Release Date 2006-09-26 UK Release Date 2006-09-26 Pages 672 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Publication Date 2006-09-26 Imprint Penguin USA Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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