The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2029 – 2045): is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by Ray Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) who is an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist. Kurzweil has been employed by Google since 2012, where he is a “director of engineering,” and speaks widely to audiences both public and private and regularly delivers keynote speeches at industry conferences like DEMO, SXSW, and TED. He maintains the news website KurzweilAI.net, which has over 3 million readers annually.

Kurzweil describes his law of accelerating returns (a concept I teach in my Mundane Astrology Course) which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterward, machines intelligence and humans would merge to become a new species.

The movie was released on July 20, 2012