The Singularity is Near

When Humans Transcend Biology
Ray Kurzweil
Duckworth Overlook, 2005 (2018 printing)

Chapter One. The Six Epochs

The Intuitive Linear View Versus the Historical Exponential View

The Six Epochs

Epoch One: Physics and Chemistry

Epoch Two: Biology and DNA

Epoch Three: Brains

Epoch Four: Technology

Epoch Five: The Merge of Technology with Human Intelligence

Epoch Six: The Universes Wakes Up

The Singularity Is Near

Chapter Two. A Theory of Technology Evolution: The Law of Accelerating Returns

p. 103
Exponential Software Price-Performance Improvement
Example: Automatic Speech-Recognition Software
 198519952000
Price$5,000$500$50
Vocabulary Size (number of words) 1,00010,000100,000
Continuous Speech? NoNoYes
User Training Required (minutes) 180605
Accuracy PoorFairGood

Chapter Three. Achieving the Computational Capacity of the Human Brain

Chapter Four. Achieving the Software of Human Intelligence: How to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain

Uploading the Human Brain

p. 200
Unenhanced humans may become increasingly hard to find.
p. 203
Ray: The word “virtual” is somewhat unfortunate. It implies “not real”, but the reality is that a virtual body is just as real as a physical body in all the ways that matter. Consider that the telephone is auditory virtual reality.

Chapter Five. GNR, Three Overlapping Revolutions

p. 205
The first half of the twenty-first century will be characterized by three overlapping revolutions—in Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics.

Genetics: The Intersection of Information and Biology

p. 224

Solving World Hunger.

Cloning technologies even offer a possible solution for world hunger: creating meat and other protein sources in a factory without animals by cloning animal muscle tissue.

Nanotechnology: The Intersection of Information and the Physical World

Robotics: Strong AI

Chapter Six. The Impact

A panoply of Impacts

...on the Human Body

Have a Heart, or Not

p. 306
Although artificial hearts are beginning to be feasible replacements, a more effective approach will be to get rid of the heart altogether. Among Freitas's designs are nanorobotic blood cells that provide their own mobility. If the blood moves autonomously, the engineering issues of the extreme pressures required for centralized pumping can be eliminated.

...on the Human Brain

...on Human Longetivity

The Longetivity of Information

p. 326
The only things you can be sure of, so the saying goes, are death and taxes—but don't be too sure about death.
—Joseph Strout, Neuroscientist

...on Warfare: The Remote, Robotic, Robust, Size-Reduced, Virtual-Reality Paradigm

...on Learning

...on Work

...on Play

...on The Intelligent Destiny of the Cosmos: Why We Are Probably Alone in the Universe

Chapter Seven. Ich bin ein Singularitarian

p. 371
Our bodies are governed by obsolete genetic programs that evolved in a bygone era, so we need to overcome our genetic heritage. [...]

My body is temporary. Its particles turn over almost completely every month. Only the pattern of my body and brain have continuity.

Chapter Eight. The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of GNR

The Idea of Relinquishment

Fine-Grained Relinquishment

p. 412
A nanocomputer would augment or replace the nucleus in every cell and provide the DNA codes. A nanobot that incorporated molecular machinery similar to ribosomes [...] would take the codes and produce the strings of amino acids.

Development of Defensive Technologies and the Impact of Regulation

p. 417
Millions of people desperately need the advances promised by gene therapy and other breakthrough biotechnology advances, but they appear to carry little political weight against a handful of well-publicized casualties from the inevitable risks of progress.

Chapter Nine. Response to Critics

The Criticism from the Complexity of Neural Processing

p. 449
[The] ratio of the apparent complexity of the brain to the design information is at least one hundred million to one.

The Criticism from the Likelihood of Government Regulation

p. 471
As reported in chapter 5, scientists have recently demonstrated the ability to reprogram skin cells into several other cell types.
p. 472
In the 2020's we will routinely have nanobots in our bloodstream keeping us healthy and augmenting our mental capabilities.

Accelerating Intelligence, Fantastic Voyage, Transcend,
Homo Deus, Les belles images,
Essays
Marc Girod