One of the greatest inventors of our time, futurist Ray Kurzweil published his landmark book The Singularity Is Near in 2005 and dozens of his predictions about technological advancements have come true—with concepts like AI, intelligent machines, and biotechnology now widely familiar to the public.
In this visionary and fundamentally optimistic new book, Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances toward the Singularity. Kurzweil predicts that by the end of this decade, AI will exceed human levels of intelligence and by 2045, we’ll be able to enhance our intelligence a millionfold, expanding our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine by connecting our brains directly to the cloud. Human life will be changed forever once we live free from the limits of biology—and this eventuality is drawing ever nearer.
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 best-selling 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.