The Singularity Is Near

When Humans Transcend Biology

By: Ray Kurzweil

Narrated by: George Wilson

Length: 24 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

“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)

One of CBS News’ Best Fall Books of 2005
Among St Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005
One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005

A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the best-selling author of How to Create a Mind and The Singularity is Nearer who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”.

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: The union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

©2005 Ray Kurzweil (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Anyone can grasp Mr. Kurzweil’s main idea: that mankind’s 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)

“Filled with imaginative, scientifically grounded speculation.... The Singularity Is Near is worth reading just for its wealth of information, all lucidly presented.... [It’s] an important book. Not everything that Kurzweil predicts may come to pass, but a lot of it will, and even if you don’t agree with everything he says, it’s 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)

Interesting subject. Boring delivery.

I thought this book would be very interesting given the subject. However, the reader and author do not complement each other.

Lot’s of great detail and very valuable information

While the delivery of the information lacks flare, it’s very important for anyone who would like to understand and mentally prepare for what’s ahead. Almost everyone is going to be caught entirely by surprise repeatedly and far too many will fight because they simply can’t understand. It’s just too bad that we didn’t do all of this a very long time ago as a species.

The Singularity is NOT near

I love Ray's analysis and optimism. If it wasn't clear on 2005, it's certainly clear today that machine learning, deep learning, neutral nets, transformers, and other AI technologies (great courses on all of these at pyimagesearch.com btw) prove we will successfully reverse engineer the brain.

Then exceed it.

However, since 2005 we've learned that our intelligence does not solely come from our brain. About half of hydrocephalic patients with >95% of their brain replaced with cerebrospinal fluid, have IQs greater than 100.

One student with greater than 97% of a normal brain replaced with cerebrospinal fluid, had an IQ of 126, was socially normal, and graduated with honors with a degree in mathematics.

How could be do that without the neural connections, data storage, and processing power Ray describes? We have no idea.

But it proves that the brain alone is not the source of human intelligence and so reverse engineering it won't create the greater than human level intelligence necessary for the singularity.

Terminal lucidity, Alzheimer patients whose brains haven't functioned for years suddenly becoming completely coherent days or hours before death is another proof that there's more to intellect than a functioning brain.

Aged fairly well

Great narration and discussion of topics that are still current. Interested to see what changes in his new book, The Singularity is Nearer.

uggghhh

I could not get past the terrible narration. I couldn't even finish this audiobook due to the disjointed and emotionless narration.

Ray is extremely intelligent!

Definitely tricky to get through. Ray is unbelievably intelligent. I'm very anxious for the future.

Still relevant

I really enjoyed listening to this book, even though it was written in 2005. I am not seeing the nanobot revolution, but other insights are very true.

Terrible narrator

I'm still not fully done with the book; but, the narrator voice is pretty bad. It's not audio quality; it's performance related. The guy just reads in a tone that doesn't help in following along or understanding. I've listened to 6 hours and I can't recall what he says after a while. He says everything in the same tone/strange inflections etc. Very strange. I would return this but I'm interested in the content so I'm trying to fight through it. I think if I took the TEXT of this book (if I had that) and fed it through a GPT-3 based voice generator, I would probably get a better read. I may figure out a way to do that. Difficult to sit though in longer sessions.

Great book

Un libro fantástico!
Lo disfrute de principio a fin!
Me gustaría leer lo que tiene que decir con el advenimiento del chatGPT, estaré esperando cualquier otro libro de él

Maybe at the time

Maybe this was interesting for when published, but very dated with boring deliver. Just wanted it to end.