‘The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology ‘ Book Review
When GNR means Genetics, Nanotechnology & Robotics and not Guns N Roses like you expect it to.
The Gist
Futurist Ray Kurzweil has been making predictions going back as far 1990 with an astonishing 86% accuracy. In his 2006 book, Ray goes hell for leather for what our future may look like, going so far as to call 2045 as the year that this happens:
"2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created."
A bold claim. But how do we get there? Ray divides the book into six epochs of where we are (Between 4 and 5 for those playing at home) to where we will be:
Some of the mind boggling highlights of that future as spread across the whopping 168,000 word count. For my own attention span been I’ve divided these up into GNR…
No, no, not not Guns N Roses, these ones:
Final Thoughts
🤯 is the most appropriate response to this book.
It can get a tad mind melting as he has conversations between himself, Molly from 2004, Molly from 2048, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud but any sci-fi fans and lovers of tech would get a kick out this. Some great ideas to play around with for anyone dabbling in futurist novel ideas
If you’d like to see how deep this rabbit hole goes, check out the links below.
Cheers,
Alex.