Couverture / Jaquette

The noted inventor and futurist's successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will refashion the human race in the decades to come

Since it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near and its vision of the future have been influential in spawning a worldwide movement with millions of followers, hundreds of books, major films (Her, Lucy, Ex Machina), and thousands of articles. During the succeeding decade many of Kurzweil's predictions about technological advancements have been borne out, and their viability has become familiar to the public through such now commonplace concepts as AI, intelligent machines, and bioengineering.

In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances in the singularity-assessing the progress of many of his predictions and examining the novel advancements that, in the near future, will bring a revolution in knowledge and an expansion of human potential. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world, atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by expanding biological capacity with nonbiological intelligence in the cloud; how life is improving with declines in areas such as poverty and violence; and the growth of technologies such as renewable energy and 3-D printing, which can be applied to everything from clothes to building materials to growing human organs. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics of current controversy as how AI will impact unemployment and the safety of autonomous cars, and "After Life" technology, which will reanimate people who have passed away through a combination of data and DNA.

Note biographique

Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for 61 years – longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a GRAMMY® Award for outstanding achievement in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has written five best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.

Fonctionnalité

REPUTATION: Kurzweil is considered one of the world's most influential futurists.

TRACK RECORD: Kurzweil's three books for Viking have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and continue to have strong backlist sales.

INVENTOR AND THEORIST: In 2011, Time cited Ray Kurzweil in the magazine's annual "100 Most Influential People" issue, noting "Kurzweil…[created] an elmost Edisonian brood of useful inventions that have earned him millions. But it's as a theoretical historian of humanity's future that he's having his broadest influence."

PUBLICITY OPPORTUNITIES: Kurzweil promotes his books aggressively and is a highly in-demand speaker.

TOPICALITY: Many of Kurzweil's predictions in earlier books are now at the forefront of public discussion on issues such as artificial intelligence, and this new book will expand upon those.

Praise for Ray Kurzweil:

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

-Bill Gates

"Not everything that Kurzweil predicts may come to pass, but a lot of it will, and even if you don't agree with everything he says, it's all worth paying attention to."

-The Philadelphia Inquirer

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