Books & Audiobooks
Ray Kurzweil writes a compelling vision for the future, built upon the rapid advancements taking place in the present. He birthed the conceptual “singularity” where AI and humanity merge (to put it plainly) in his earlier book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. He also demonstrated an astounding accuracy in forecasting technological advancements and their impacts on our world from the 1990s and early 2000s. His newest book, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI, builds on this legacy, while giving the reader much in the way of hope and optimism.
I don’t want to give too much of the book away but I was met with possibilities of a future that I couldn’t help but be excited about. I’m a settler, so my considerations are limited, but I couldn’t help but see the solutions Kurzweil presented as being in service to equity and justice for Indigenous people in Canada.
The book paints a hopeful technological future. This includes a discussion on “replicants.” Kurzweil details how the data that one generates through a lifetime can bring those who have passed on “back to life” through a realistic rendering of their person when this is uploaded to an AI repository.
Kurzweil also writes about a machine called the Slingshot which transforms any water (including sewage and contaminated swamp water) to drinkable water. I considered the role this might play in bringing clean drinking water to Indigenous communities where federal governments have repeatedly stated it is too complex an infrastructural problem to address. Could a Slingshot, or Slingshot-type device (the size of a refrigerator, and uses under a kilowatt to operate, among other features) be effective and a long-term solution? Would this be an equally cost-effective solution that would ease stresses on the water table as communities develop further into protected Greenbelt areas in Ontario?
Kurzweil also takes on questions about the job market and deskilling to upskilling. We can seldom anticipate the future in its fullest expression, but when Kurzweil is doing the anticipating, it’s worth paying attention. It’s also great reading for policy wonks (of which I consider myself), though I was wondering what an AI treatment of policy writing and development at a local level might look like, where there are generative AI PDF readers and more. Kurzweil’s view is big picture, and I wondered what it would look like to hyper-localize its contents. How might these concepts apply to the Region of Waterloo, in service to the public good and the commons, as with public libraries? These inferences and the questions the reader might ask after reading is a testament to the readability of The Singularity is Nearer.
Some might argue that it is too positivist a rendering of the future, despite its cautions in the chapter titled Peril. Kurzweil does not write in as critical a fashion as some might hope. If readers are looking for these cautions of the applications of AI, they may be better suited reading The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg, or The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, and perhaps Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and The Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford to name a few. There are also ethical considerations around post-biological evolution (where AI merges with humans as an evolutionary turn) that Kurzweil is silent on, but that is a still-developing field of inquiry which includes his latest book.
If you attend or host a book club that reads non-fiction, I highly recommend adding Ray Kurzweil’s latest offering to your lineup. Even if you aren’t part of a book club, I still highly recommend adding it to your to-read stack. It’s difficult to recommend to a single group or person because the technology he writes about inevitably impacts us all. Avoiding any jargon or industry-specific language, Kurzweil’s writing is approachable and lacks pretense that can leave even the savviest reader averse to niche-leaning books. It is a can’t-miss book for changemakers and those who love them.
Want to keep reading? Check out these titles for similarly compelling portraits of the future:
- The Future of Geography by Tim Marshall
- Upgrade by Blake Crouch (fiction)
- Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in The Stars by Avi Loeb
- The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (fiction)
- Quantum Supremacy: How The Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything by Dr. Michio Kaku
- The Nature of Our Cities by Nadina Galle (ICYMI, you can read my blog post about this book here)