| Sumario: | A review of The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil, who is possibly today's most vocal enthusiast of artificial intelligence. In this book, Kurzweil argues that as computers grow more and more powerful, artificial intelligence will surpass biological intelligence and will even absorb it. He predicts that human civilization will be superseded by a hybrid civilization of men and computers, and that, as time progresses, humans will discard their organic habits and become beings of pure information, eventually saturating the entire universe with disembodied intelligence. Kurzweil names this new paradigm the Singularity, and predicts that it will be upon us by about 2045. If the transformation of human society depends on solving the puzzle of the human mind via reverse-engineering, however, the Singularity is much farther away than Kurzweil believes.
|
|---|