Nearly twenty years ago Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity Is Near (2005). The book gained widespread attention and popularized the concept of the “technological singularity,” a hypothetical point in the future when advances in fields like AI, biotechnology, and nanotechnology would lead to profound changes in society. As it turned out Kurzweil was spot on and these concepts are, of course, widely familiar today.
In his new book, The Singularity is Nearer, Kurzweil assesses his prediction that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and examines 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.
Ray Kurzweil will be joined in conversation with his daughter, New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil.
About the Speakers
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 61 years–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 bestselling 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.
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two graphic memoirs. Artificial: A Love Story documents her father Ray Kurzweil’s quest to preserve his father through AI, and Flying Couch tells the story of three generations of women in her family. Amy was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow, and her series with The Believer Magazine, Technofeelia, has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz award. Her work has also been published in many outlets including The Verge, NYTBR, and Wired.
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Photo by Weinberg-Clark Photography