The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Startling in scope and bravado.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.” —Los Angeles Times

“Elaborate, smart and persuasive.” —The Boston Globe

“A pleasure to read.” —The Wall Street Journal

One of CBS News’s Best Fall Books of 2005 • Among St Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 • One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005

A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of How to Create a Mind and The Age of Spiritual Machines who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

• How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
• The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
• Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever
• Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series)
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
• Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine
• The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics)
• Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
• The Denial of Death