The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI - Softcover

Kurzweil, Ray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593489411 ISBN 13: 9780593489413

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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The noted inventor and futurist's successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will refashion 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 the future have been influential in spawning a worldwide movement with millions of followers, hundreds of books, major films (Her, Lucy, Ex Machina), and thousands of articles. During the succeeding decade many of Kurzweil's predictions about technological advancements have been borne out, and their viability has become familiar to the public through such now commonplace concepts as AI, intelligent machines, and bioengineering.



In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances in the singularity-assessing the progress of many of his predictions and examining the novel advancements that, in the near future, will bring a revolution in knowledge and an expansion of human potential. 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 expanding biological capacity with nonbiological intelligence in the cloud; how life is improving with declines in areas such as poverty and violence; and the growth of technologies such as renewable energy and 3-D printing, which can be applied to everything from clothes to building materials to growing human organs. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics of current controversy as how AI will impact unemployment and the safety of autonomous cars, and "After Life" technology, which will reanimate people who have passed away through a combination of data and DNA.

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Introduction

In my 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, I set forth my theory that convergent, exponential technological trends are leading to a transi­tion that will be utterly transformative for humanity. There are several key areas of change that are continuing to accelerate simultaneously: computing power is becoming cheaper, human biology is becoming better understood, and engineering is becoming possible at far smaller scales. As artificial intelligence grows in ability and information be­comes more accessible, we are integrating these capabilities ever more closely with our natural biological intelligence. Eventually nanotech­nology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the compu­tational power that our biology gave us. This will expand our intelli­gence and consciousness so profoundly that it s difficult to comprehend. This event is what I mean by the Singularity.

The term singularity is borrowed from mathematics (where it refers to an undefined point in a function, like when dividing by zero) and physics (where it refers to the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole, where the normal laws of physics break down). But it is important to remember that I use the term as a metaphor. My predic­tion of the technological Singularity does not suggest that rates of change will actually become infinite, as exponential growth does not imply infinity, nor does a physical singularity. A black hole has gravity strong enough to trap even light itself, but there is no means in quantum mechanics to account for a truly infinite amount of mass. Rather, I use the singularity metaphor because it captures our inability to compre­hend such a radical shift with our current level of intelligence. But as the transition happens, we will enhance our cognition quickly enough to adapt.

As I detailed in The Singularity Is Near, long-term trends suggest that the Singularity will happen around 2045. At the time that book was published, that date lay forty years two full generations in the future. At that distance I could make predictions about the broad forces that would bring about this transformation, but for most read­ers the subject was still relatively far removed from daily reality in 2005. And many critics argued then that my timeline was overopti­mistic, or even that the Singularity was impossible.

Since then, though, something remarkable has happened. Progress has continued to accelerate in defiance of the doubters. Social media and smartphones have gone from virtually nonexistent to all-day com­panions that now connect a majority of the world s population. Algo­rithmic innovations and the emergence of big data have allowed AI to achieve startling breakthroughs sooner than even experts expected from mastering games like Jeopardy! and Go to driving automobiles, writing essays, passing bar exams, and diagnosing cancer. Now, power­ful and flexible large language models like GPT 4 and Gemini can trans­late natural-language instructions into computer code dramatically reducing the barrier between humans and machines. By the time you read this, tens of millions of people likely will have experienced these capabilities firsthand. Meanwhile, the cost to sequence a human s ge­nome has fallen by about 99.997 percent, and neural networks have begun unlocking major medical discoveries by simulating biology dig­itally. We re even gaining the ability to finally connect computers to brains directly.

Underlying all these developments is what I call the law of acceler­ating returns: information technologies like computing get exponen­tially cheaper because each advance makes it easier to desig

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593489411
• ISBN 13: 9780593489413
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Penguin Random House Ireland; https://eu-contact.penguin.ie; ; Arnulfstr. 124; München; 80636; Deutschland