The Singularity Is Near

About the book

Ray Kurzweil (b. 1948) is a computer scientist, inventor and what current terminology — overlooking the term’s established uses — calls a ‘futurist’. A bestselling author, he has received honorary doctorates from several universities. His thesis is that artificial intelligence will far surpass human intelligence in the first half of the twenty-first century — and the singularity will have occurred. This superior intelligence will be indistinguishable from human intelligence: conversing, without quotation marks, with an interlocutor behind a wall, a person will not know whether they are speaking to another human or a machine.

The consequences of this exponential development in computing are terrifying or promise heaven on earth, depending on one’s perspective. Kurzweil is, of course, an ‘integrationist’: everything resulting from computational culture will be positive — such as the abolition of death. The ‘apocalyptic’ camp speaks of chaos and humanity’s subjection to machines. As the book’s subtitle indicates, Kurzweil foresees the moment when humanity transcends biology’s limitations: human and machine will form a single entity in which, one may reasonably suppose, the machine component will become increasingly powerful and eliminate what was previously human. A new concept of the human being would arise. For Kurzweil, the result will simply be a new form of humanity. If evolutionary theory is correct, he argues, there is no reason to regard humanity’s present stage as its last and definitive one. Kurzweil’s positive utopia — until now a contradiction in terms, since utopias have always been negative even when they considered themselves positive — has various opponents, including E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops, published in the same collection referred to by this synopsis. This book’s broad and reasoned vision of what computational culture may become leaves no reader indifferent.