Ray Kurzweil: Before the Age of Singularity

In an elegant room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, overlooking a duck pond in the urban Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil presented a chart depicting the steady growth of the raw computing power of a dollar over the past 85 years. A neon-green line stretched across the page, rising like fireworks in the night sky. This upward line, Kurzweil explained, demonstrates why humanity is only 20 years away from the singularity, that long-hypothesized moment when humans will merge with artificial intelligence and augment themselves with computing power millions of times greater than their biological brains. “If you create something a thousand or million times more powerful than the brain, we cannot predict what it will do,” he said, dressed in brightly striped suspenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney World in the early 1980s. Kurzweil, a renowned inventor and futurist who has built his career on unconventional predictions, made the same claim in his 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near." In light of the arrival of AI technologies such as ChatGPT and recent efforts to implant computer chips in human brains, he believes that now is the right time to reaffirm his prediction. Last week, he released a sequel: "The Singularity Is Nearer." As Kurzweil, now 76 years old, moves more slowly than before, his forecasts gain additional urgency. He has long claimed that he plans to experience the singularity, merge with AI, and thereby live indefinitely. But if the singularity occurs in 2045, as he predicts, there is no guarantee he will still be alive to experience it.