The Singularity Is Nearer： When We Merge with AI

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTUAL PEOPLE IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The noted inventor and futurist’s successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come

Since it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near and its vision of an exponential future have spawned a worldwide movement. Kurzweil's predictions about technological advancements have largely come true, with concepts like AI, intelligent machines, and biotechnology now widely familiar to the public.

In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances toward the Singularity—assessing his 1999 prediction that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and examining 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 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 best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.

雷·库兹韦尔是世界级的发明家、思想家和未来学家，35 年来一直准确预测未来。他已成为人工智能领域的领先开发者 61 年，比任何在世的人都要长。他是第一台 CCD 平板扫描仪、全字体光学字符识别器、盲人用文字转语音阅读机、文本转语音合成器、可重现三角钢琴和其他管弦乐器的音乐合成器以及商业销售的大词汇量语音识别软件的主要发明者。雷因在音乐技术领域的杰出成就荣获格莱美奖；他是国家技术奖章获得者，并入选国家发明家名人堂。他撰写了五本畅销书，包括《奇点临近》和《如何创造思维》。他是谷歌的首席研究员和人工智能远见者。