The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The legendary oracle of technological change explains how AI will transform our species beyond recognition within two decades. ‘The best person I know at predicting the future of AI’ BILL GATES ‘Essential reading to understand our exponential times’ MUSTAFA SULEYMAN ‘Fascinating . . . raises the most profound philosophical questions’ YUVAL NOAH HARARI What will it mean to live free from the limits of our bodies? Who will we become if our minds can be stored and duplicated? What new realms of beauty, connection and wonder might we inhabit? How will we navigate the risks presented by such awesomely powerful technology? By the end of this decade, AI will exceed human levels of intelligence. During the 2030s, it will become ‘superintelligent’, vastly outstripping our capabilities and enabling dramatic 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, explores what it will mean to live free from the limits of biology and argues that we can and will transform life on Earth profoundly for the better. ‘The greatest oracle of our digital age’ PETER H. DIAMANDIS, founder of XPRIZE ‘Curious about the future? Read this book’ VINT CERF, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google