The Singularity is Nearer
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  • Published: 20 July 2024
  • ISBN: 9781847928290
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $69.99

The Singularity is Nearer

When We Merge with AI

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
25 Jun 2024
EBook
20 Jun 2024
Audiobook
27 Jun 2024
Hardback
20 Jul 2024
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The legendary oracle of technological change explains how AI will transform our species beyond recognition within two decades

By the end of this decade, AI will exceed human levels of intelligence. During the 2030s, it will become ‘superintelligent’, vastly outstripping our capabilities by almost every measure and enabling dramatic new interventions in our bodies. By 2045, we will be able to connect our brains directly with AI, enhancing our intelligence a millionfold and expanding our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine. This is the Singularity.


Ray Kurzweil is one of the greatest inventors of our time with over 60 years’ experience in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Dozens of his long-range predictions about the rise of the internet, AI and bioengineering have been borne out. In this visionary and fundamentally optimistic book, Kurzweil explains how the Singularity will occur and explores what it will mean to live free from the limits of biology.


What will we choose if our bodies need no longer define us? What new realms of beauty, connection and wonder might we inhabit? Who will we become if our minds can be stored and duplicated? How will we navigate the risks presented by such awesomely powerful technology?


Drawing on a lifetime’s expertise and marshalling the evidence of today’s rapidly accelerating advances, Kurzweil presents deeply reasoned answers to these questions and argues that we can and will transform life on earth profoundly for the better.
  • Published: 20 July 2024
  • ISBN: 9781847928290
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $69.99
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About the author

RAY KURZWEIL

Ray Kurzweil is one of the greatest inventors of our time and the author of several prescient books, including The Singularity Is Near and The Age of Spiritual Machines. Over the past thirty years, dozens of his predictions about technology have been borne out, including the rise of the internet, AI and bioengineering, while his vision of ‘the singularity’ has inspired several major films, hundreds of books and thousands of articles. He is a former director of engineering at Google, the recipient of the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation, one of the nation’s highest honours, and is a member of the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. He lives in Boston.

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Praise for The Singularity is Nearer

Ray Kurzweil’s Moore’s Law abstraction is the most important thing ever graphed. Its continuity – over his lifetime of writing – is the greatest take-away for the future of humanity, and the future of intelligence

Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director of Future Ventures

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer is to information technology what Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was to life science – a cogent, fact-based, clear-eyed, multi-disciplinary exposition of a fundamental truth about the world. There can be no more salient guide to the next two decades of life

Martine Rothblatt, founder of United Therapeutics

Ray explores mounting evidence that we are – right now – on the brink of a new human civilization. We’ll experience life in a whole new way. Everyone seriously concerned about the future should read this book

Dean Kamen, recipient of the US National Medal of Technology

My view of the future has been forever impacted by Ray Kurzweil. Twenty-four years ago, he predicted AI would reach human-level intelligence by 2029. His vision seemed like a dream and yet here we are, right on track. This book will challenge everything you know about technology, life and death. It will light you up with answers to today’s most pressing questions about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity

Tony Robbins, author of Awaken the Giant Within

Kurzweil makes a compelling case . . . It is only 2023 and already the world he envisioned years ago is taking shape. Curious about the Future? Read this book

Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

Ray Kurzweil is the greatest oracle of our digital age. The Singularity Is Nearer is more than just a book—it's a survival guide for the technological renaissance we're about to experience. Ray’s accurate projections of what is likely to happen and when, makes the difference between surfing atop the tsunami of change, versus being crushed by it

Peter H. Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE

A fascinating exploration of our future, which raises the most profound philosophical questions -- YUVAL NOAH HARARI

YUVAL NOAH HARARI

Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence

BILL GATES

Few people have shaped how the world thinks about AI like Ray Kurzweil. Now, with The Singularity Is Nearer, he has written an expansive and hopeful guide to a fast-approaching future that will once again set the terms of debate. Grounded in decades of meticulous research, and written with impressive clarity across an immense canvas, it's essential reading for anyone wanting to understand our exponential times

MUSTAFA SULEYMAN, CEO of Microsoft AI and author of The Coming Wave

What Kurzweil describes in his book isn't just the dawn of a beautiful new age, but the unknowable night at the ending of one

Mail on Sunday

When it comes to artificial intelligence, no one has more experience than Ray Kurzweil

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