The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Paperback)

by Ray Kurzweil (Author) "I am not sure when I first became aware of the Singularity..." (more)
Key Phrases: nonbiological portion, nonbiological intelligence, biological human intelligence, Moore's Law, Deep Fritz, Deep Blue (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Renowned inventor Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) may be technology's most credibly hyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent cancer; here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence. Humankind, it runs, is at the threshold of an epoch ("the singularity," a reference to the theoretical limitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the staggering achievements of "GNR" (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a species of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so on. The word "unrecognizable" is not chosen lightly: wherever this is heading, it won't look like us. Kurzweil's argument is necessarily twofold: it's not enough to argue that there are virtually no constraints on our capacity; he must also convince readers that such developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation of the species with "immortality," for which read a repeal of human limit. In less capable hands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a bewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would be easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientist—a large-minded one at that—and gives due space both to "the panoply of existential risks" as he sees them and the many presumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What's arresting isn't the degree to which Kurzweil's heady and bracing vision fails to convince—given the scope of his projections, that's inevitable—but the degree to which it seems downright plausible. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Kurzweil is one of the world’s most respected thinkers and entrepreneurs. Yet the thesis he posits in Singularity is so singular that many readers will be astounded—and perhaps skeptical. Think Blade Runner or Being John Malkovich magnified trillion-fold. Even if one were to embrace his techno-optimism, which he backs up with fascinating details, Kurzweil leaves some important questions relating to politics, economics, and morality unanswered. If machines in our bodies can rebuild cells, for example, why couldn’t they be reengineered as weapons? Or think of singularity, notes the New York Times Book Review, as the "Manhattan Project model of pure science without ethical constraints." Kurzweil’s vision requires technology, which we continue to build. But it also requires mass acceptance and faith.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143037889
• ISBN-13: 978-0143037880
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (139 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,129 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

206 of 232 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Important extrapolations, but not as careful or concise as I wanted, September 22, 2005

By	Peter McCluskey (Mountain View, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Hardcover)

Kurzweil does a good job of arguing that extrapolating trends such as Moore's Law is better than most alternative forecasting methods, and he does a good job of describing the implications of those trends. But he is a bit long-winded, and tries to hedge his methodology by pointing to specific research results which he seems to think buttress his conclusions. He neither convinces me that he is good at distinguishing hype from value when analyzing current projects, nor that doing so would help with the longer-term forecasting that constitutes the important aspect of the book.
Given the title, I was slightly surprised that he predicts that AIs will become powerful slightly more gradually than I recall him suggesting previously (which is a good deal more gradual than most Singulitarians). He offsets this by predicting more dramatic changes in the 22nd century than I imagined could be extrapolated from existing trends.
His discussion of the practical importance of reversible computing is clearer than anything else I've read on this subject.
When he gets specific, large parts of what he says seem almost right, but there are quite a few details that are misleading enough that I want to quibble with them.
For instance (talking about the world circa 2030): "The bulk of the additional energy needed is likely to come from new nanoscale solar, wind, and geothermal technologies." Yet he says little to justify this, and most of what I know suggests that wind and geothermal have little hope of satisfying more than 1 or 2 percent of new energy demand.
His reference to "the devastating effect that illegal file sharing has had on the music-recording industry" seems to say something undesirable about his perspective.
His comments on economists thoughts about deflation are confused and irrelevant.
On page 92 he says "Is the problem that we are not running the evolutionary algorithms long enough? ... This won't work, however, because conventional genetic algorithms reach an asymptote in their level of performance, so running them for a longer period of time won't help." If "conventional" excludes genetic programming, then maybe his claim is plausible. But genetic programming originator John Koza claims his results keep improving when he uses more computing power.
His description of nanotech progress seems naive. (page 228) "Drexler's dissertation ... laid out the foundation and provided the road map still being followed today." (page 234): "each aspect of Drexler's conceptual designs has been validated". I've been following this area pretty carefully, and I'm aware of some computer simulations which do a tiny fraction of what is needed, but if any lab research is being done that could be considered to follow Drexler's road map, it's a well kept secret. Kurzweil then offsets his lack of documentation for those claims by going overboard about documenting his accurate claim that "no serious flaw in Drexler's nanoassembler concept has been described".
Kurzweil argues that self-replicating nanobots will sometimes be desirable. I find this poorly thought out. His reasons for wanting them could be satisfied by nanobots that replicate under the control of a responsible AI.
I'm bothered by his complacent attitude toward the risks of AI. He sometimes hints that he is concerned, but his suggestions for dealing with the risks don't indicate that he has given much thought to the subject. He has a footnote that mentions Yudkowsky's Guidelines on Friendly AI. The context could lead readers to think they are comparable to the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology. Alas, Yudkowsky's guidelines depend on concepts which are hard enough to understand that few researchers are likely to comprehend them, and the few who have tried disagree about their importance.

612 of 712 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Technically brilliant, culturally constrained, September 25, 2005

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Hardcover)

Ray Kurzweil is unquestionably the most brilliant guru for the future of information technology, but Joel Garreau's book Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human covers the same ground, with the same lack of soul, but more interesting and varied detail.

This is really four booklets in one: a booklet on the imminence of exponential growth within information technologies including genetics, nano-technology, and robotics; a booklet on the general directions and possibilities within each of these three areas; a booklet responding to critics of his past works; and lengthy notes. All four are exceptional in their detail, but somewhat dry.

I was disappointed to see no mention of Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization and just one tiny reference to Stewart Brand (co-evolution) in a note. Howard Rheingold (virtual reality) and Tom Atlee (collective intelligence) go unmentioned. It is almost as if Kurzweil, who is surely familiar with these "populist" works, has a disdain for those who evaluate the socio-cultural implications of technology, rather than only its technical merits.

This is an important book, but it is by a nerd for nerds. [Sorry, but anyone who takes 250 vitamin supplements and has a schedule of both direct intravenous supplements and almost daily blood testing, is an obsessive nerd however worthy the cause.] It assumes that information technologies, growing exponentially, will solve world hunger, eliminate disease, replenish water, create renewable energy, and allow all of us to have the bodies we want, and to see and feel in our mates the bodies they want. All of this is said somewhat blandly, without the socio-cultural exploration or global evaluation that is characteristic of other works by reporters on the technology, rather than the technologists themselves.

The book is, in short, divorced from the humanities and the human condition, and devoid of any understanding of the pathos and pathology of immoral governments and corporations that will do anything they can to derail progress that is not profitable. It addresses, but with cursory concern, most of the fears voiced by various critics about run-away machines and lethal technologies that self-replicate in toxic manners to the detriment of their human creators.

The book is strongest in its detailed discussion of both computing power and draconian drops in needed energy for both computing and for manufacturing using new forms of computing. The charts are fun and helpful. The index is quite good.

I put the book down, after a pleasant afternoon of study, with several feelings.

First, that I should give Joel Garreau higher marks for making this interesting, and recommend that his book be bought at the same time as this one.

Second, that there is an interesting schism between the Kurzweil-Gates gang that believes they can rule the world with machines; and the Atlee-Wheatley gang that believes that collective **human** intelligence, with machines playing a facilitating but not a dominant role, is the desired outcome.

Third that there really are very promising technologies with considerable potential down the road, but that government is not being serious about stressing peaceful applications--the author is one of five advisors to the U.S. military on advanced technologies, and it distresses me that he supports a Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) that focuses on making war rather than peace--imagine if we applied the same resources to preventing war and creating wealth?

Fourth, information technologies are indeed going to change the balance of power among nations, states, and neighborhoods--on balance, based on his explicit cautions, I predict a real estate collapse in the over-priced major cities of the US, and a phenomenal rise of high-technology villages in Costa Rica and elsewhere.

The singularity may be near, as the author suggests, but between now and then tens of millions more will die. Technology in isolation is not enough--absent broad ethical context, it remains primarily a vehicle for nerds to develop and corporations to exploit. As I told an internal think session at Interval in the 1990's ("GOD, MAN, & INFORMATION:. COMMENTS TO INTERVAL IN-HOUSE". Tuesday, 9 March 1993" can use as a Yahoo search) until our technologies can change the lives of every man, woman, and child in the Third World, they are not truly transformative. This book hints at a future that may not be achieved, not for lack of technology, but for lack of good will.

EDIT of 24 Oct 05: Tonight I will review James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century His bottom line is that cheap oil underlies all of our surburban, high-rise, mega-agriculture, and car-based mobility, and that the end of cheap oil is going to have catastrophic effects on how we live, driving much of the country into poverty and dislocation, with the best lives being in those communities that learn to live with local agriculture and local power options. Definitely the opposite of what Kurzweil sees, and therefore recommended as a competing viewpoint.

EDIT of 12 Dec 07: ethics is something I have thought about a lot, and my first public article outside the intelligence community was entitled "E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & Intelligence: An Alternative Paradigm for *National* Intelligence." It must be something about engineers. Neither the author of this book, nor the Google Triumverate, seem to grasp the moral implications of technology run amuk without respect for ethics, privacy, copyright, humanity, etc. This is one reason I admire E. O. Wilson so much--the first of his works that I read, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, answered the question: "Why do the sciences need the humanities?" The second, The Future of Life, answered the question, "What is the cost and how do we save the planet?" Science had little to do with the latter. The two authors are poles apart.

76 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Technophilic ecstacy, September 22, 2005

By	Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Hardcover)

The author is definitely one of the most inspiring of all researchers in the field of applied artificial intelligence. For those, such as this reviewer, who are working "in the trenches" of applied AI, his website is better than morning coffee. One does not have to agree with all the conclusions reached by the author in order to enjoy this book, but he does make a good case, albeit somewhat qualitative, for the occurrence, in this century, of what he and other futurists have called a `technological singularity.' He defines this as a period in the future where the rate of technological change will be so high that human life will be `irreversibly transformed.' There is much debate about this notion in the popular literature on AI, but in scientific and academic circles it has been greeted with mixed reviews. Such skepticism in the latter is expected and justified, for scientists and academic researchers need more quantitative justification than is usually provided by the enthusiasts of the singularity, which in this book the author calls "singularitarians." Even more interesting though is that the notion of rapid technological change seems to be ignored by the business community, who actually stand to gain (or lose) the most by it.

Since this book is aimed primarily at a wide audience, and not professional researchers, the author does not include detailed arguments or definitions for the notion of machine intelligence or a list of the hundreds of examples of intelligent machines that are now working in the field. Indeed, if one were to include a discussion of each of these examples, this book would swell to thousands of pages. There are machines right now used in business and industry that can manage, troubleshoot, and analyze networks, diagnose illnesses, compose music definitely worth listening to, choreograph dances, simulate human behavior in computer games, recommend and engage in financial transactions and bargaining, and many, many other tasks, a detailed list of which would, again, entail many thousands of pages.


There are various psychological issues that arise when discussing machine intelligence, which if believed might prohibit the acceptance of any kind of notion of a technological singularity. For example, it is one of the historical peculiarities of research in AI that advances in the field are later trivialized, i.e. when a problem in AI becomes solved it no longer holds any mystery and is then considered to be just another part of information processing. It is then no longer regarded as `intelligent' in any sense of the term. This phenomenon in AI research might be called the "Michie-McCorduck-Hofstader effect", named after the three individuals, Donald Michie, Barbara McCorduck, and Douglas Hofstader, who discussed it some detail in their writings. If one examines the history of AI, one finds many examples of this effect, such as in knowledge discovery from databases, the use of business rules in database technologies, and the use of ontologies for information systems development. One of the best examples of this effect though is the backgammon player TD-Gammon, a highly sophisticated example of machine intelligence but which is now considered to be merely part of the "programmer's toolbox." The Michie-McCorduck-Hofstader effect is important in discussing the notion of a technological singularity since if one does occur this effect would diminish one's ability to recognize it as being real. The author does not name this phenomenon as such in the book, but a reading of it definitely reveals that he is aware of the skepticism expressed by many towards any "advances" in machine intelligence.
Another one of these psychological issues regards the attitude of many philosophers on the notion of machine intelligence. In most cases they are extremely skeptical, and many AI researchers seem to feel the need to "refute" their opinions on the "impossibility" of intelligent machines. Unfortunately the author is one of these, and devotes space in the book to counter various philosophical arguments against AI. His arguments, although valid, are really a waste of time though. Such time would be better spent, both for the author and for AI researchers, in the actual development of intelligent machines. A moratorium should be declared among AI researchers on all philosophical speculation. Such musings are best left to professional philosophers, who have the time and the inclination to indulge themselves in them.

There are other issues that should have been given more attention in the book, such as more details on the energy requirements needed to bring about such a singularity. In addition, the author needs to sharpen just what he means by intelligence and move away from the Turing test/human brain benchmark that he uses in the book. There are many examples of intelligence in the natural world, and these can and have been emulated in many different types of machines. Interestingly, the fixation on human intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain (that is exemplified in this book) has inspired a few research teams to attempt to build a machine of "general intelligence", i.e. one that can think in many different domains, as clearly humans can. But it is still an open question whether this intelligence is "entangled" over these domains, i.e. whether or not a decrease in ability in one domain will affect the ability in another. From an evolutionary or efficiency standpoint it would seem that that domain specific intelligence is more optimal.

The notion of a technological singularity can be met with both exhilaration and a sense of foreboding, since (radical) change can be embraced with enthusiasm and with some feelings of anxiety. Even the author expresses this when he writes in the book that he is not "entirely comfortable" with all the consequences of a technological singularity. He has though made a fairly strong case for rapidly accelerating change. If the book concentrated more on the actual examples of intelligent machines and included the enormous amount of data from activities in applied AI that are now going on, an even stronger case could be made.