Recently, I decided to buy another copy and re-read it - after all, I still consider it to be one of the best books I've ever read. Unfortunately, at some point the book wasn't returned and I wasn't too fussed as I'd already read it thoroughly. Kurzweil now works at Google where his job description is 'to bring natural language understanding to Google' - a goal not too distant from developing an AI capable of passing the Turing test.ĭuring my time as a software developer, discussions often arose about the future of technology and I would occasionally lend the book to other developers. The book quickly became an absolute page-turner for me and as incredulous as it sounded, Kurzweil backed up every prediction with thorough research, logic, and his own impressive credentials - Kurzweil was something of a child prodigy who programmed computers and wrote scientific papers at an early age and became the inventor of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and the Kurzweil digital pianos and keyboards that bear his name.

Indeed, if Kurzweil's predictions do come true, they are comparible in their size and implications to the Second Coming of Jesus - the conquering of death and the unification of all consciousness in to one computational substrate that is to become more powerful than anything in the Universe and spreads outward from the Earth at the speed of light. In fact, although Kurzweil says early on in the book that his view of the future is neither utopian nor dystopian, the future described is so rosy that the Singularity has also been called 'the Geeks' Rapture'. The clarity of Kurzweil's writing, the level of detail he went in to about each concept he discussed and the content itself were entirely captivating, not least because the predictions were set to happen in the near future and would change the world in to an unrecognisable utopia. As someone who'd always been fascinated by computers and technology since I started programming my first ZX Spectrum as a child, through to my teenage years programming in QBASIC, to my work as a Web Developer, I was well aware of Moore's law and very conscious of the accelerating progress in technology.Īs I started to read, it became clear that this was an exceptional book. Back in 2007 I was very excited to start reading The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil which had been published 2 years earlier in 2005.

The singularity is near book review