About this item
The noted inventor and futurists successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will refashion the human race in the decades to comeSince it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweils 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 Kurzweils 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.
About the Author
Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." PBS selected him as one of the "sixteen revolutionaries who made America."Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Among Ray's many honors, he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012) . He is Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
